Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology NewsletterVolume 12, Number 10, 21 March 2005

Editor/Publisher: David J. Thomas, Ph.D., Science Division, Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas 72503-2317, USA. dthomas@lyon.edu

Marsbugs is published on a weekly to monthly basis as warranted by the number of articles and announcements. Copyright of this compilation exists with the editor, but individual authors retain the copyright of specific articles. Opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the authors, and are not necessarily endorsed by the editor or by Lyon College. E-mail subscriptions are free, and may be obtained by contacting the editor. Information concerning the scope of this newsletter, subscription formats and availability of back-issues is available at http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs. The editor does not condone "spamming" of subscribers. Readers would appreciate it if others would not send unsolicited e-mail using the Marsbugs mailing lists. Persons who have information that may be of interest to subscribers of Marsbugs should send that information to the editor.

Articles and News

Page 1 RICHNESS OF OCEAN LIFE REFLECTED IN A TEST TUBE, SCIENTISTS SAYBy Carolyn Gramling

Page 2 THE MARTIAN FROZEN SEA (INTERVIEW WITH JOHN MURRAY)By Leslie Mullen

Page 3 BIOLOGY STUDENTS LEARN TO SCAN THE STARS FOR SIGNS OF LIFEBy Lori Stiles

Page 4 CARNEGIE MELLON DETECTION SYSTEM FINDS LIFE IN ATACAMA DESERT—MARS MAY BE FUTURE SITE FOR ROVER-BASED TECHNOLOGYBy Amy Pavlak

Page 5 SCIENTISTS STRUGGLE TO DIGEST SURPRISES FROM EUROPE'S MARS CRAFTBy Leonard David

Page 5 BLUE PLANET: THE MONSTER IN THE BACK YARDBy Dan Whipple

Page 5 WARMING UP TO A MARTIAN CARCASSBy Leslie Mullen

Page 6 ADVANCEMENTS IN GENOMICS FOSTERS DEEP SEA DISCOVERIES LED BY SCRIPPS—UNDERSTANDING HOW CREATURES SURVIVE IN HARSH ENVIRONMENT MAY LEAD TO CLUES FOR HEALTHIER FOOD, SEARCHING FOR LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS, AND ADVANCES IN BIOTECHNOLOGYScripps Institution release

Page 7 EN ROUTE TO MARS, THE MOONBy Trudy E. Bell and Tony Phillips

Page 8 CREATIONISTS TAKE THEIR FIGHT TO THE REALLY BIG SCREEN—U.S. ROW FORCES SOUTHERN IMAX CINEMAS TO SHUN FILMS ON EVOLUTION By Robin McKie

Announcements

Page 8 "ALIEN EARTHS" OPENS AND HOSTS NAI E/PO FOR A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOPFrom the NAI Newsletter

Page 9 ASTROBIOLOGY SUMMER WORKSHOPS FOR EDUCATORSFrom the NAI Newsletter

Page 9 NEW JOURNAL: JGR BIOGEOSCIENCESFrom the NAI Newsletter

Page 9 MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION CONFERENCE (MBE) '05From the NAI Newsletter

Page 9 2005 ASGSB MEETING ANNOUNCEMENTAmerican Society for Gravitational and Space Biology release

Mission Reports

Page 9 CASSINI UPDATESNASA/JPL releases

Page 12 DIAGNOSTIC TESTS PLANNED FOR INSTRUMENT ON MARS ROVERNASA/JPL release 2005-04515 March 2005

Page 13 MARS EXPRESS STATUS REPORT—FEBRUARY 2005ESA release

Page 14 MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGESNASA/JPL/MSSS release

Page 14 MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGESNASA/JPL/ASU release

Page 14 ROSETTA: REPORT ON EARTH FLYBY (25 FEBRUARY TO 11 MARCH 2005)ESA release

RICHNESS OF OCEAN LIFE REFLECTED IN A TEST TUBE, SCIENTISTS SAYBy Carolyn GramlingUniversity of Florida release10 March 2005

Ecologists know that when it comes to habitats, size matters, and now a new study finds that contrary to earlier beliefs, that maxim holds true right down to the tiny plants at the bottom of many oceanic and freshwater food chains. The study, conducted by University of Florida, University of Kansas and University of Texas researchers, is important because it shows that tiny microbes follow the same diversity patterns as larger organisms, said Robert D. Holt, a UF professor of zoology and one of the study's authors. The study appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition, species diversity is "a reflection of the richness of life," Holt said. Though there are few rigorous mathematical laws in ecology, that relationship between the size of a habitat and the range of species in it has been observed for nearly all organisms. "Understanding the diversity of life itself is a basic scientific question, in the same way as understanding the causes for the diversity of human civilizations around the world, or understanding questions like the origin of the universe.

Earlier studies have suggested that the diversity-habitat size rule may not hold true for one of the most ubiquitous species in the world: phytoplankton, a group of microscopic algae afloat in the world's oceans, seas and lakes. In contrast, the new study demonstrates that the range of phytoplankton species in an ecosystem increases with ecosystem size according to a general

Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 10, 21 March 2005

mathematical rule. The study also finds that this holds true whether the system is a laboratory test tube or an ocean.

"A skeptic might say, 'I cannot conceive of how a bottle in the lab that holds as much as a can of beer can tell me anything about Lake Okeechobee,'" said Val Smith, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas and the lead author on the study. But for at least this one principle, that connection exists, Smith said. "Species diversity scales upward with size," he said.

The researchers analyzed pre-existing scientific data on phytoplankton species in 142 oceans, lakes and natural ponds worldwide, ranging from a few square inches to millions of square miles, and from 239 laboratory test tubes, flasks and beakers. They found that not only did a correlation between species diversity and habitat area exist for natural water bodies like lakes and oceans, but that an identical pattern exists for experimental ecosystems such as test tubes and laboratory tanks.

"Interestingly, that must say something about the mechanism that controls species diversity," Smith said. "If it works for (habitats ranging from) little tiny flasks on the desktop to the Arctic Ocean, that says something about how size really matters. We need to figure out which elements of size are the dominant factors that cause this pattern."

Some of the factors known to influence species variety within a habitat are simply size-dependent, Holt said. For example, some species, such as sharks, simply require more space to survive. "There's not enough for them to eat in a small lake," he said.

Bigger ecosystems also will tend to have a greater variety of mini-habitats within them. A large lake contains both shallow and deep areas and can therefore accommodate a greater variety of organisms than a shallow pond, he said. And with the larger total population sizes found in a larger habitat, overall species extinction rates are likely to be lower. Other possible causes are related to interactions between ecosystems. Larger habitats are bigger targets for the wind or for migrating birds that can transfer algal cells. And larger freshwater bodies tend to have higher river inflows, which can also transport more algae. For the phytoplankton, the most important factors influencing species diversity are not yet certain, Holt said. However, because the experimental ecosystems were cut off from the surrounding area but the diversity trend was nearly identical to that of the open natural systems, internal factors may play a stronger role, he said. "You're restricting the processes that could be acting on them, but you're still seeing this scaling effect," he said.

Previous studies have looked for a species-area relationship in phytoplankton but found none, possibly because their sample sizes were too small, Smith said. The current study used data from samples spanning more than 15 orders of magnitude, compared with three or four in previous studies.

The results are encouraging for scientists who want to get a handle on scientific questions in hard-to-study, ocean-scale systems, Holt said. "By studying these smaller systems we may be getting insight into much larger systems where it's impossible to do experiments and where it's really hard even to get the raw data," he said.

Smith agreed. "The fact that lab-scale systems behave similarly to larger natural systems gives us hope that if we ask questions at the lab scale, properly phrased, we can get reasonable answers."

Journal reference:V. H. Smith, et al., 2005. Phytoplankton species richness scales consistently from laboratory microcosms to the world's oceans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online before print, 10.1073/pnas.0500094102.http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0500094102v1

Contacts:Carolyn GramlingPhone: 352-392-0186E-mai: gramling@ufl.edu

Robert D. HoltPhone: 352-392-6917E-mail: rdholt@zoo.ufl.edu

Read the original news release at http://www.napa.ufl.edu/2005news/oceandiversity.htm.

An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1486.html.

THE MARTIAN FROZEN SEA (INTERVIEW WITH JOHN MURRAY)By Leslie MullenFrom Astrobiology Magazine14 March 2005

At the recent European Space Agency's Mars Express conference, scientists announced they had found a frozen sea on the martian equator. John Murray, from the Department of Earth Sciences at the Open University in the UK, is lead author on the paper to be published in the journal Nature. Astrobiology Magazine editor Leslie Mullen sat down with Murray to discuss the new finding.

Astrobiology Magazine (AM): How did you discover the frozen sea on Mars?

John Murray (JM): What attracted me to the area were these broken plates on the surface. I'd been looking at Valles Marineris previously, and wondering how the collapsed features there had formed. It took two hours to go through the entire image, because the images are huge, perhaps one or two hundred feet long, and you're looking at them on computer screens. They're 65 kilometers across at minimum, and they have a resolution down to 10 meters.

Left: Slice through the Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in our solar system. Right: MARSIS's long antenna will fly over Mars, bouncing radio waves over a selected area and then receiving and analyzing the "echoes." Any near-surface liquid water should send a strong signal. Image credits: NASA/JPL.

Some features looked as if they'd drifted, so I was looking for rotation, but there was none at all. Then I saw a huge block of rock several miles wide that had rotated. Initially I thought it was the result of a vast flood that somehow had moved this rock and caused it to rotate. But then I realized the whole thing had a very flat surface, and that they were not really rocks at all but flat irregular plates colored slightly darker than the intervening areas.

I started looking at the image in more detail, and it suddenly struck me that it looked exactly like pack ice. Then I got together with my colleague Peter Muller and my student David Page, and we found seven or eight features that are common to pack ice in the Arctic and Antarctic.

At that stage, I hadn't realized that areas to the east of this region, where similar kinds of features are found, had already been interpreted as lava. But I am a volcanologist, and I have spent the last 36 years working on active volcanoes, spending a month or two every year looking at lava forming. So I know what lava can and what it can't do. There were a number of things that indicated that these features on Mars could not be lava. The consensus among my colleagues is that this is ice.

AM: But speaking of volcanism, you say the ice is covered by volcanic ash and dust, and that has prevented it from subliming—turning directly from a solid into a gas.

JM: That's true; this ice has to be preserved by a covering because ice sublimes when it's exposed. Water ice is not stable under Mars atmospheric pressure. The obvious candidate for the covering is volcanic ash and dust. But we know there must be dust there anyway, because the ice is not bright white; it's not like Antarctica.

AM: But why a covering of volcanic dust versus the sands of Mars?

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Erupting about 5 million years ago, from a series of fractures known as the Cerberus Fossae, the water flowed down in a catastrophic flood, collecting in an area 800 x 900 km and was initially an average of 45 meters deep. Image credit: ESA/Mars Express.

JM: When this event happened, there's evidence that the Cerberus Fossae erupted both volcanic ash and dust. You can see the sequence of events. You can see where the water has come out of the Cerberus Fossae, these deep fissures on Mars, and flowed down for hundreds of kilometers. The water filled a vast area the size of Lake Michigan, and the surface then froze. You had the volcanic ash falling on the ice when it first formed over this sea, and the ash protected the ice. Then there was a drop in the water level—it's clear that the water level has dropped by about 20 meters since it first formed—and the surface ice broke up to form these icebergs or ice floes. The blocks drifted around and rotated, and then the whole thing froze solid again.

AM: How do you know the water level dropped? Do you see an erosion pattern in the surrounding soil caused by the receding water level?

JM: There are submerged craters where the ice has settled down on top of them as the water level dropped. You can see where the ice floe has become stuck on both the outside and the inside of the crater. Only the lowering of the water level would have caused ice to become draped along the outside of a crater and also down into it.

Characteristic terrestrial landforms that accompany glacial fracturing. Image credit: ESA.

AM: What caused the water to flow out onto the surface of Mars? The volcanism?

JM: It might have been volcanism. The other possibility is this idea of Clifford and Parker, which has been around for years, of an ice-rich surface of Mars. It was a wacky idea when it first came out, but it does explain an awful lot of things. The surface must be ice because of the cold temperatures, but as you go down into Mars, geothermal heating melts this ice into liquid. They've calculated that at a depth of several kilometers, you're supposed to get these pockets of liquid water.

So if you tectonically crack the ice-rich surface down to this water-rich layer, then, since Mars has virtually no atmospheric pressure, the water is going to shoot out, like opening a bottle of champagne. That water will evaporate immediately because of the low pressure, but the volume of water would be so huge, the rate of this water discharge would be so high, that there's not enough time for most of it to boil or freeze. It just flows and erodes. After it eroded the channel it would have spread out to form the vast lake, and then would have continued to evaporate until the top level began to freeze.

AM: Could the cracking of the crust down to that level have been caused by volcanism rather than tectonics?

JM: It could have been volcanism. There is the big Elysium volcano to the north, but that is really quite old. It is possible the cracking is some late manifestation associated with that, though it is actually quite far from the foot of Elysium, and there are very few signs of volcanic vents along most of the cracks.

AM: So these deep caverns on Mars are places where water has burst out of underground aquifers. Do you think there are more such places that haven't yet cracked open?

JM: There are a lot of places where you don't see signs of tectonic cracking. So presumably, beneath those, we'll find untapped areas of water.

AM: You found this frozen sea at the equator, which is significant because so far there's been no evidence for water at the equator.

JM: That's right. There's been some recent models looking at the tilt of Mars's axis, which at the moment is very similar to the Earth's. But that appears to be a coincidence, because throughout most of Mars's history, the axis was at 45 degrees, a far greater tilt. As soon as you have a tilt of 45 degrees, you get a whole different climate, with more water ice and frost deposition at the equator. It's possible when this flood event occurred; it was during this period of frost deposition.

Gerhard Neukum dated this particular feature by counting the number of impact craters, and discovered it was only about 5 million years old. 5 million years sounds ancient to you and me, but in geological terms it's yesterday.

Now, as soon as you start to think about that, and that the kinds of things you require for life to form are water and carbon and an energy source and unlimited amounts of time—you have all those things here. If you've got supplies of liquid water underground, then life may have been able to develop and sustain itself and reproduce. Underground life also would be protected from ultraviolet radiation and oxidation, things that will break up molecules at the surface.

Mars was warm and wet during its first billion years, and has probably had these vast underground water reserves ever since, from 3 or 4 billion years ago to at least 5 million years ago. A million is an awful long time. There has not yet been a million days since the birth of Christ, for example. And we're not just talking about a million years, but thousands of millions of years of this water being there, under the surface. That is plenty of time for life to develop, if it could. And so if life has developed, then I think it's highly likely it will be in this water, in this frozen sea. So we won't be looking for fossils, we'll be looking for the actual organisms themselves, frozen within the ice.

Journal reference:J. B. Murray et al., 2005. Evidence from the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera for a frozen sea close to Mars' equator. Nature, 434(7031):352-356.http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v434/n7031/abs/nature03379_fs.html

Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1485.html.

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050316_mars_geology.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-water-science-05e.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-life-05e.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/marsexpress-05g.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/mars_geologically_active.html

BIOLOGY STUDENTS LEARN TO SCAN THE STARS FOR SIGNS OF LIFEBy Lori StilesUniversity of Arizona release15 March 2005

You have to learn to crack eggs if you're going to cook an omelet. You have to jump in the water if you're going to learn to swim. And you have to get your hands on telescopes that can search for signs of life beyond Earth if you're going to study extraterrestrial biology. That's why 14 University of Washington graduate biology students will be at Kitt Peak National

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Observatory this week (March 17-21) to learn observing techniques from University of Arizona and National Optical Astronomy Observatory astronomers.

The UW students are specializing in a new science called "astrobiology" that involves studying biological processes on the Earth and beyond. It's a multidisciplinary science that combines research in physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and planetary science.

The astronomy faculty and biology students will use Kitt Peak's world-class telescopes to study interstellar molecules, the sun, and sun-like stars that may be capable of supporting life. Interstellar molecules are molecules of chemical compounds in the space between the stars and the "building blocks" of astrobiology.

The telescopes and faculty involved in the program are: The Kitt Peak 12-meter (40-foot) Telescope, part of UA's Arizona Radio Observatory, directed by Lucy Ziurys, UA professor of

chemistry and astronomy. Ziurys and Steward Observatory's Aldo Apponi will conduct the lab, "Interstellar Molecules as Probes of Star Formation and Prebiotic Chemistry."

The McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope. Mark Giampapa, deputy director of the National Solar Observatory, will lead sessions in solar astronomy that measure magnetic fields and spectra of the sun as analogs to sun-like stars.

The 2.3-meter (90-inch) Steward Observatory Bok Telescope. UA astronomy Professor Nick Woolf, director of LAPLACE, and Steward Observatory's Daniel Apai and Paul Smith will conduct a lab on "Optical Spectroscopy of Young Sun-like Stars." LAPLACE is the Tucson-based Life and Planets Astrobiology Center, part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

The 2.1-meter (83-inch) Kitt Peak National Observatory Telescope. Michael Meyer, UA assistant astronomy professor, and UA astronomy graduate student Wayne Schlingman will use a near-infrared camera on the telescope for their lab sessions on "Near-Infrared Imaging of Extremely Young Star Clusters—Investigating the Formation of Sun-like Stars."

The Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO (WIYN) 0.9-meter (35-inch) Optical Telescope. Astrophysicist William Sherry and Steward Observatory's Nick Siegler will lead a lab on the "Optical Imaging of Extremely Young Star-Clusters: Investigating the Formation of Sun-like Stars."

Kitt Peak Public Viewing Telescopes. Kitt Peak staff will assist the biology students in observing and photographing the night sky.

Other participants in the exchange include: Jonathan Lunine of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Woody Sullivan of UW Tom Olien, UA visiting professor from Humber College, Toronto Anna Spitz, manager of the LAPLACE program Cathi Duncan, LAPLACE program coordinator

The UW students' visit to Kitt Peak is part of a 2005 exchange program being sponsored by LAPLACE and UW. UA astronomy students will conduct marine biology field work, courtesy of the UW, next fall.

LAPLACE is a node of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, an international research consortium that studies the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and in the universe. For more on LAPLACE, see http://www.laplace.arizona.edu.

Contacts:Anna SpitzPhone: 520-621-3234E-mail: aspitz@as.arizona.edu

Cathi DuncanPhone: 520-626-8792E-mail: cduncan@as.arizona.edu

Neville Woolf:Phone: 520-621-3234 E-mail: nwoof@as.arizona.edu

Lori StilesUA News ServicesPhone: 520-621-1877

CARNEGIE MELLON DETECTION SYSTEM FINDS LIFE IN ATACAMA DESERT—MARS MAY BE FUTURE SITE FOR ROVER-BASED TECHNOLOGYBy Amy PavlakCarnegie-Mellon University release15 March 2005

Current Mars expeditions raise the tantalizing possibility that there may be life somewhere on the red planet. But just how will future missions find it? A system being developed by Carnegie Mellon scientists could provide the answer. At the 36th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston this week (March 14-18), Carnegie Mellon scientist Alan Waggoner is presenting results of the life detection system's recent performance in Chile's Atacama Desert, where it found growing lichens and bacterial colonies. This marks the first time a rover-based automated technology has been used to identify life in this harsh region, which serves as a test bed for technology that could be deployed in future Mars missions.

"Our life detection system worked very well, and something like it ultimately may enable robots to look for life on Mars," says Waggoner, a member of the "Life in the Atacama" project team and director of the Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center at Carnegie Mellon's Mellon College of Science.

Alan Waggoner, Atacama team member and director of the Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center at Carnegie Mellon, crouches next to Zoë, a robotic rover, to spray the life-detection probes onto the sample area. In the future, the probes will be sprayed from instrumentation located underneath the rover (© 2005 Carnegie Mellon University).

The "Life in the Atacama" 2004 field season—from August to mid-October—was the second phase of a three-year program whose goal is to understand how life can be detected by a rover that is being controlled by a remote science team. The project is part of NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology Program for Exploring Planets, or ASTEP, which concentrates on pushing the limits of technology in harsh environments. David Wettergreen, associate research professor in Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, leads rover development and field investigation. Nathalie Cabrol, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute, leads the science investigation.

Life is barely detectable over most areas of the Atacama, but the rover's instruments were able to detect lichens and bacterial colonies in two areas: a coastal region with a more humid climate and an interior, very arid region less hospitable to life.

"We saw very clear signals from chlorophyll, DNA and protein. And we were able to visually identify biological materials from a standard image captured by the rover," says Waggoner. "Taken together, these four pieces of evidence are strong indicators of life. Now, our findings are being confirmed in the lab. Samples collected in the Atacama were examined, and scientists found that they contained life. The lichens and bacteria in the samples are growing and awaiting analysis."

Waggoner and his colleagues have designed a life detection system equipped to detect fluorescence signals from sparse life forms, including those that are

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mere millimeters in size. Their fluorescence imager, which is located underneath the rover, detects signals from chlorophyll-based life, such as cyanobacteria in lichens, and fluorescent signals from a set of dyes designed to light up only when they bind to nucleic acid, protein, lipid or carbohydrate—all molecules of life.

The image at left is a normal color image taken by the life detection system. The image at right shows a fluorescent signal from chlorophyll (© 2005 Carnegie Mellon University).

"We don't know of other remote methods capable both of detecting low levels of micro-organisms and visualizing high levels incorporated as biofilms or colonies," says Gregory Fisher, project imaging scientist. "Our fluorescent imager is the first imaging system to work in the daylight while in the shade of the rover. The rover uses solar energy to operate so it needs to travel during daylight hours. Many times, the images we capture may only reveal a faint signal. Any sunlight that leaks in to the camera of a conventional fluorescence imager would obscure the signal," Waggoner says.

"To avoid this problem, we designed our system to excite dyes with high intensity flashes of light. The camera only opens during those flashes, so we are able to capture a strong fluorescence signal during daytime exploration," says Shmuel Weinstein, project manager.

During the mission, a remote science team located in Pittsburgh instructed the rover's operations. A ground team at the site collected samples studied by the rover to bring back for further examination in the lab. On a typical day in the field, the rover followed a path designated the previous day by the remote operations science team. The rover stopped occasionally to perform detailed surface inspection, effectively creating a "macroscopic quilt" of geologic and biological data in selected 10 by 10 centimeter panels. After the rover departed a region, the ground team collected samples examined by the rover.

"Based on the rover findings in the field and our tests in the laboratory, there is not one example of the rover giving a false positive. Every sample we tested had bacteria in it," says Edwin Minkley, director of the Center for Biotechnology and Environmental Processes in the Department of Biological Sciences.

Minkley is conducting analyses to determine the genetic characteristics of the recovered bacteria to identify the different microbial species present in the samples. He also is testing the bacteria's sensitivity to ultraviolet (UV) radiation. One hypothesis is that the bacteria may have greater UV resistance because they are exposed to extreme UV radiation in the desert environment. According to Minkley, this characterization also may explain why such a high proportion of the bacteria from the most arid site are pigmented—red, yellow or pink—as they grow in the laboratory. The first phase of the project began in 2003 when a solar-powered robot named Hyperion, also developed at Carnegie Mellon, was taken to the Atacama as a research test bed. Scientists conducted experiments with Hyperion to determine the optimum design, software and instrumentation for a robot that would be used in more extensive experiments conducted in 2004 and in 2005. Zoë, the rover used in the 2004 field season, is the result of that work. In the final year of the project, plans call for Zoë, equipped with a full array of instruments, to operate autonomously as it travels 50 kilometers over a two-month period.

The science team, led by Cabrol, is made up of geologists and biologists who study both Earth and Mars at institutions including NASA's Ames Research Center and Johnson Space Center, SETI Institute, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, Carnegie Mellon, Universidad Catolica del Norte (Chile), the University of Arizona, UCLA, the British Antarctic Survey, and the International Research School of Planetary Sciences (Pescara, Italy).

The Life in the Atacama project is funded with a three-year, $3 million grant from NASA to Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. William "Red" Whittaker is the principal investigator. Waggoner is principal investigator for the companion project in life-detection instruments, which garnered a separate $900,000 grant from NASA. For more information on the Life in the Atacama project see http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/atacama/.

Read the original news release at http://www.cmu.edu/cmnews/extra/050315_atacama.html.

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1484.htmlhttp://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/rover_life_050315.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/robot_life_desert.html

SCIENTISTS STRUGGLE TO DIGEST SURPRISES FROM EUROPE'S MARS CRAFTBy Leonard DavidFrom Space.com16 March 2005

Europe’s Mars Express spacecraft is casting new light on the past and present status of the red planet, wowing scientists with an impressive set of distinctive observations and in some quarters promoting a tinge of jealousy. Europe’s first and on-going mission to Mars has spotted signs of very recent volcanic activity along with the vestiges of glaciers and gigantic waterfalls. Given these and other findings from the Mars orbiting spacecraft, it is not unreasonable to suggest that life on Mars not only emerged but could have survived to the present in underground niches. The latest in Mars Express data and what’s ahead for the mission is being shared between some 1,500 space scientists attending the 36th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held here March 14-18 and co-sponsored by the Lunar and Planetary Institute and NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

"Clearly, thanks to the instruments on Mars Express, we are seeing a new Mars... a Mars that we didn’t expect," said Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Science Program. "We have found evidence of recent volcanism, which is yesterday in the scale of martian history, as well as very recent glacial activity and ice deposits."

Read the full article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050316_mars_express.html.

BLUE PLANET: THE MONSTER IN THE BACK YARDBy Dan WhippleFrom UPI and SpaceDaily16 March 2005

Hollywood has expended considerable capital on bringing vast natural disaster scenarios to the silver screen. Asteroids and comets pulverizing Earth from space, glaciers crushing Lexington Avenue, earthquakes rearranging the California coast, all have challenged the talents of the studios' computer animators, but have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. Such catastrophic possibilities excite audiences because they contain a particle of reality—they all are not only theoretically possible, but also historically documented. At one time or another, they have befallen the planet. Yet another blockbuster is right around the corner—geologically speaking—and it threatens the whole western half of the United States. It is a massive eruption of the vast caldera located in Yellowstone National Park.

Read the full article at http://www.terradaily.com/news/tectonics-05zh.html.

WARMING UP TO A MARTIAN CARCASSBy Leslie MullenFrom Astrobiology Magazine16 March 2005

The detection of methane on Mars has generated a lot of speculation about what could possibly be producing it. Is it coming out of active volcanoes? Maybe the methane results from some geologic or chemical process we don't yet understand. Or, since much of the methane on Earth is produced by biology, perhaps the faint whiffs of methane point to the existence of present-day life on Mars.

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Dorothy Oehler, of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, says there is another source worth considering. She suggests that some methane could come from the remains of past life on Mars—namely, from the thermal alteration of buried kerogen. Kerogen is ancient organic crud, the remains of decayed organisms. When buried kerogen is cooked by the Earth's internal heat, it turns into oil and methane. This source of hydrocarbon can be extremely long-lived—the Earth still has Precambrian kerogen that is slowly but steadily releasing methane into the environment.

Many scientists believe that the Meridiani Plains on Mars is an ancient lake bed, because Meridiani is rich in hematite, an iron oxide mineral that forms in the presence of water. If Meridiani did harbor a lake or sea, any life forms living in the waters would have accumulated on the sea floor after they died. Over time, layers of decaying organisms would have become buried kerogen, just as they do on Earth.

Left: Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, driving tracks across the flat Meridiani Plains. Image credit: NASA/JPL. Right: Like much of Mars, Meridiani is pocketed with many meteor impact craters. Some of these craters seem to have a halo of lighter material surrounding them. The red arrows point to bright rims that may be related to methane seepage. The black arrow points to an uplifted crater rim. Image credit: Malin Space Science Systems.

"Everybody seems to think early Mars was not too different from early Earth, and early Earth certainly had a vast array of microbial organisms," says Oehler. "I think there's at least a fair chance that life evolved on early Mars. Whether it lasted and is still going on, I'm not even prepared to say, but if it were there in the past, then maybe there are remnants of it buried in the sediments."

Like much of Mars, Meridiani is pocketed with many meteor impact craters. Some of these craters seem to have a halo of lighter material surrounding them. According to Oehler, some of these light-colored rings might be bulls-eyes, targeting zones of buried kerogen.

"Last year, scientists pointed out similarities between bright rings around martian craters at the Meridiani site and bleached regions in Utah—places where red sandstones have whitish rims," says Oehler.

The sandstone in Utah is red because iron oxide coats the quartz grains that make up the rock. The light rings in the Utah rocks are thought to have formed when the iron was dissolved by water and was flushed away. In that case, the light rings were due to the iron oxide being removed from the area. But in a region studied by Oehler, methane that seeped up to the surface transformed iron oxide into pyrite, changing the color of the rock from red to grey. In that case, the "bleaching effect" was due to the red iron oxide mineral being transformed into another substance.

"On Earth, a lot of areas of red bed bleaching are related to seeping hydrocarbons from oil and gas fields at depth," says Oehler, who worked in the oil industry for more than 20 years. "And oil and gas fields are created from the thermal alteration of kerogen."

The thermal alteration of kerogen on Earth is mostly due to geothermal heating. As the kerogen gets buried many kilometers below the surface, the Earth's interior heat turns the kerogen into methane. Mars likely has some interior heating as well, but because the kerogen is probably not buried that deeply, and because Mars has been cooler than Earth for much of its history, Oehler believes a more likely cause of thermal alteration would come from the heat of a meteorite impact.

On Mars, some light rings surrounding craters could be due to the play of light on uplifted crater rims. The raised rim edges can look bright to the Mars

Orbital Camera, compared to lower lying areas. But these "bright" uplifted crater rims look quite different from the light rings being studied by Oehler and her colleagues.

"It is interesting to me that we don't see similar bright crater rings everywhere," says Oehler. "There are a lot of craters on Mars, but we've seen the bright crater rings mainly at Meridiani and some of the areas immediately adjacent to it. That suggests to me that Meridiani is somehow different from other regions on Mars."

Another cause of light crater rings on Mars could be an overlying crust of salt or other evaporite materials. Spectral analysis of these rings might be able to pinpoint exactly what the light rings are made of.

"If you ever could get samples of it, and found either carbonates, pyrite, or jarosite, I think that would be very interesting, because all of those things happen on Earth in zones of seeping hydrocarbons," says Oehler. "If you found sulfate evaporate minerals like gypsum or anhydrite, or just salt, it would be less indicative of anything related to seeping methane."

If the light rings on Mars are the result of kerogen that was heated by impact, samples of that kerogen could provide information about past life on Mars. Paleontologists commonly analyze kerogen for detailed information about ancient life on Earth.

"You can look at kerogen and find microfossils in it," says Oehler. "When you look at it under a microscope you often can see preserved structures, such as bacteria and algae. You can look for remnants of cell walls and internal structures. You also can get some of the remnants of biochemicals."

The oldest structures date back 3.5 billion years, but because they are poorly preserved their origin is controversial. Some think the structures are the remains of ancient biology, while others think they are just carbon globs unrelated to life. But Oehler says there is no debate about better preserved structures dating from slightly later periods in Earth's history—the remains of ancient life can clearly be seen, for instance, in the Gunflint chert, which dates back to 2 billion years ago. Any kerogen on Mars probably would have been buried 2 or 3 billion years ago, when Mars may have still had bodies of liquid water on the surface.

Age is not the only factor affecting the quality of a kerogen sample. If kerogen has been subjected to high pressures and temperatures, such as kerogen in metamorphic rock, it will be poorly preserved. So Oehler doesn't think the impact craters on Mars would yield kerogen that could reveal ancient structures, due to the high pressure and heat of impact.

"But," she notes, "if microorganisms were buried in the general area, all through the shallow Meridiani lake, you could look at the unaffected areas between the impact craters for samples of martian kerogen."

Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1487.html.

ADVANCEMENTS IN GENOMICS FOSTERS DEEP SEA DISCOVERIES LED BY SCRIPPS—UNDERSTANDING HOW CREATURES SURVIVE IN HARSH ENVIRONMENT MAY LEAD TO CLUES FOR HEALTHIER FOOD, SEARCHING FOR LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS, AND ADVANCES IN BIOTECHNOLOGYScripps Institution release16 March 2005

At one time, scientists wondered whether life existed in the deep recesses of the world's oceans. What kinds of creatures, they wondered, could withstand the dark, cold and extreme pressure of such an environment? Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and their colleagues have used innovations in genomics research to begin to develop an accurate portrayal of deep sea life forms and how they survive in the harsh conditions of the marine abyss.

Scripps Institution Professor Douglas Bartlett discussed the new findings at the American Chemical Society's (ACS) national meeting in San Diego on Monday, March 14, 2005. Related research was published in a scientific paper in the March 4 issue of the journal Science. In the paper and ACS presentation, Bartlett and colleagues at the University of Padova (Italy), presented the first genetic blueprint for bacterial life in a cold deep-sea environment. They also presented a detailed analysis of how the bacteria's genetic makeup allows it to function in high-pressure environments. These

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findings may help lay the groundwork for a variety of research outside of the deep ocean, including the application of deep sea bacterial genes for improving human nutrition and degrading pollutants, and calculating possibilities for life in pressurized environments elsewhere in the solar system.

"These organisms live in a world that is physically very different from the skin of the planet in which we humans reside," said Bartlett, who is part of the Scripps Marine Biology Research Division. "They live in a world where temperature, for the most part, doesn't vary very much, but pressure as they move up and down the water column can. They sense that pressure." The overwhelming majority of the volume of the planet where life exists, more than 75 percent, exists in the deep sea, while some 20 percent exists in the shallow water environment and a mere half of a percent is on land.

Extreme deep ocean conditions include near freezing temperatures and up to 15,000 pounds per square inch of "skull-crushing" pressure. Scientists say precious information lies in discovering how organisms have adapted and evolved to such conditions. Bartlett and his colleagues probed the genetic makeup of Photobacterium profundum, a bacterium that copes with pressures of 4,000 pounds per square inch. The researchers grow the microbes in high-pressure cylinders kept cold and dark in Bartlett's laboratory at Scripps. Bartlett's past genetic analyses revealed a creature that can sense changes in pressure using a natural barometer-like mechanism, which adjusts the flexibility of its membranes to cope with different levels of pressure.

"There's a protein within the membrane that gets squeezed when the cells experience higher pressure, and that triggers a signal transduction event that activates the expression of genes that help the cells to adapt to the increased pressure," said Bartlett.

The scientists found other tantalizing discoveries in Photobacterium profundum, including a novel fermentative process, adaptations to electron, proton and nutrient transport across membranes and a large number of previously unknown genes.

Scripps has been a pioneer in researching life in the deep ocean abyss for more than 50 years. Bartlett's studies follow the pioneering work in the 1950s of Claude ZoBell, who provided the first evidence of deep sea high-pressure microbes, and research begun in the 1960s by Art Yayanos, who was the first to isolate pure cultures of high-pressure-adapted microbes from their native environments. This work was funded at Scripps Institution by the National Science Foundation.

Contacts: Mario Aguilera or Cindy ClarkPhone: 858-534-3624E-mail: scrippsnews@ucsd.edu

Read the original news release at http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/article_detail.cfm?article_num=667.

EN ROUTE TO MARS, THE MOONBy Trudy E. Bell and Tony PhillipsFrom NASA Science News18 March 2005

NASA has a new Vision for Space Exploration: in the decades ahead, humans will land on Mars and explore the red planet. Brief visits will lead to longer stays and, maybe one day, to colonies. First, though, we're returning to the Moon. Why the Moon before Mars?

The Moon, an alien world in Earth's backyard. Image credit: International Space Station astronaut Leroy Chiao.

"The Moon is a natural first step," explains Philip Metzger, a physicist at NASA Kennedy Space Center. "It's nearby. We can practice living, working and doing science there before taking longer and riskier trips to Mars."

The Moon and Mars have a lot in common. The Moon has only one-sixth Earth's gravity; Mars has one-third. The Moon has no atmosphere; the martian atmosphere is highly rarefied. The Moon can get very cold, as low as -240°C in shadows; Mars varies between -20° and -100°C.

Even more important, both planets are covered with silt-fine dust, called "regolith." The Moon's regolith was created by the ceaseless bombardment of micrometeorites, cosmic rays and particles of solar wind breaking down rocks for billions of years. Martian regolith resulted from the impacts of more massive meteorites and even asteroids, plus ages of daily erosion from water and wind. There are places on both worlds where the regolith is 10+ meters deep.

Operating mechanical equipment in the presence of so much dust is a formidable challenge. Just last month, Metzger co-chaired a meeting on the topic: "Granular Materials in Lunar and Martian Exploration," held at the Kennedy Space Center. Participants grappled with issues ranging from basic transportation ("What kind of tires does a Mars buggy need?") to mining ("How deep can you dig before the hole collapses?") to dust storms—both natural and artificial ("How much dust will a landing rocket kick up?"). Answering these questions on Earth isn't easy. Moondust and Mars dust is so... alien.

Dust flies from the tires of a moon buggy, driven by Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. These "rooster-tails" of dust caused problems, which the astronauts solved using duct tape. Image credit: NASA.

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Try this: run your finger across the screen of your computer. You'll get a little residue of dust clinging to your fingertip. It's soft and fuzzy—that's Earth dust. Lunar dust is different: "It's almost like fragments of glass or coral—odd shapes that are very sharp and interlocking," says Metzger.

"Even after short moon walks, Apollo 17 astronauts found dust particles had jammed the shoulder joints of their spacesuits," says Masami Nakagawa, associate professor in the mining engineering department of the Colorado School of Mines. "Moondust penetrated into seals, causing the spacesuits to leak some air pressure."

In sunlit areas, adds Nakagawa, fine dust levitated above the Apollo astronauts' knees and even above their heads, because individual particles were electrostatically charged by the Sun's ultraviolet light. Such dust particles, when tracked into the astronauts' habitat where they would become airborne, irritated their eyes and lungs. "It's a potentially serious problem."

An Apollo 17 astronaut digs a trench to study the mechanical behavior of moondust. Image credit: NASA.

Dust is also ubiquitous on Mars, although Mars dust is probably not as sharp as moondust. Weathering smooths the edges. Nevertheless, martian duststorms whip these particles 50 m/s (100+ mph), scouring and wearing every exposed surface. As the rovers Spirit and Opportunity have revealed, Mars dust (like moondust) is probably electrically charged. It clings to solar panels, blocks sunlight and reduces the amount of power that can be generated for a surface mission.

Close-up pictures of moondust returned to Earth by Apollo astronauts. Image credit: Masami Nakagawa.

For these reasons, NASA is funding Nakagawa's Project Dust, a four-year study dedicated to finding ways of mitigating the effects of dust on robotic and human exploration, ranging from designs of air filters to thin-film coatings that repel dust from spacesuits and machinery. The Moon is also a good testing ground for what mission planners call "in situ resource utilization" (ISRU)—a.k.a. "living off the land." Astronauts on Mars are going to want to mine certain raw materials locally: oxygen for breathing,

water for drinking and rocket fuel (essentially hydrogen and oxygen) for the journey home. "We can try this on the Moon first," says Metzger.

Both the Moon and Mars are thought to harbor water frozen in the ground. The evidence for this is indirect. NASA and ESA spacecraft have detected hydrogen—presumably the H in H2O—in martian soil. Putative icy deposits range from the martian poles almost to the equator. Lunar ice, on the other hand, is localized near the Moon's north and south poles deep inside craters where the Sun never shines, according to similar data from Lunar Prospector and Clementine, two spacecraft that mapped the Moon in the mid-1990s. If this ice could be excavated, thawed out and broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen... Voila! Instant supplies. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, due to launch in 2008, will use modern sensors to search for deposits and pinpoint possible mining sites.

"The lunar poles are a cold place, so we've been working with people who specialize in cold places to figure out how to land on the soils and dig into the permafrost to excavate water," Metzger says. Prime among NASA's partners are investigators from the Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL). Key challenges include ways of landing rockets or building habitats on ice-rich soils without having their heat melt the ground so it collapses under their weight.

Testing all this technology on the Moon, which is only 2 or 3 days away from Earth, is going to be much easier than testing it on Mars, six months away. So to Mars! But first, the Moon.

Read the original article at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/18mar_moonfirst.htm.

CREATIONISTS TAKE THEIR FIGHT TO THE REALLY BIG SCREEN—U.S. ROW FORCES SOUTHERN IMAX CINEMAS TO SHUN FILMS ON EVOLUTION By Robin McKieFrom The Observer20 March 2005

They are the epitome of safe family entertainment, renowned for lavish animations, exquisitely filmed scenes of natural grandeur and utterly tame scripts. But Imax films have suddenly found themselves catapulted into controversy, thanks to their occasional use of the dreaded E-word: evolution. In several U.S. states, Imax cinemas—including some at science museums—are refusing to show movies that mention the subject or suggest that Earth's origins do not conform with biblical descriptions. Films include Cosmic Voyage, an animated journey through the universe; Galapagos, a documentary about the islands where Darwin made some of his most important observations; and Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, an underwater epic about the bizarre creatures that flourish near ocean vents.

Read the full article at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1441818,00.html or at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0320-03.htm.

"ALIEN EARTHS" OPENS AND HOSTS NAI E/PO FOR A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOPFrom the NAI Newsletter18 March 2005

The exhibits of Alien Earths, which present astrobiology-related research and discoveries to students and the general public, opened to museum-goers on February 5th at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, CA. In its four themes, Our Place in Space, Star and Planet Formation, Planet Quest, and The Search for Life, Alien Earths incorporates input from various NASA Origins missions: Hubble, Spitzer, Navigator, Kepler, SOFIA, NAI, and FUSE. Alien Earths explores the breadth and depth of concepts related to understanding the origins of and search for life elsewhere through its many hands-on exhibits and visualizations.

Exhibit developers at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, CO presented an NAI Central sponsored two-day workshop for NAI E/PO leads and other

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NASA E/PO professionals on March 7 and 8th. Participants from NAI’s IPTAI, SETI Institute, MBL, UCLA, University of Arizona, and Ames teams learned about the growing field of informal science education from an expert Bay Area panel, and practiced the art of docent-led exhibit facilitation first hand. Consequently, several E/PO leads are exploring the possibility of bringing Alien Earths to their local museums. For more information, see http://lhs.berkeley.edu/exhibits/alienearths.html.

ASTROBIOLOGY SUMMER WORKSHOPS FOR EDUCATORSFrom the NAI Newsletter18 March 2005

Over the years, NAI’s teams have produced enlightening and informative workshops for educators during their summer hiatus. This year is no exception with five exciting offerings from NAI teams at the SETI Institute, Penn State, MBL, and the University of Hawaii, and the Lunar and Planetary Institute. The workshops are typically one week long, and include lectures and interaction with NAI scientists, tours and hands-on work in laboratories and observatories, and field trips. The workshops are each unique, but share the common focus of conveying current information on research in astrobiology, and exploring practical ways to use that information in the classroom through hands-on, inquiry based activities and lesson plans. Descriptions of and links to the workshops are at http://nai.nasa.gov/teachers.

NEW JOURNAL: JGR BIOGEOSCIENCESFrom the NAI Newsletter18 March 2005

The new journal, JGR Biogeosciences, is currently inviting submission of papers for review. Astrobiology/exobiology submissions are encouraged as this is one of the focus areas of the new journal.

"This new section of JGR will focus on biogeosciences of the Earth system in the past, present, and future and its applicability to planetary studies. The emerging field of 'biogeosciences' spans the intellectual interface between biology and the geosciences and attempts to understand the functions of the Earth system across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Studies in biogeosciences may employ multiple lines of evidence drawn from diverse fields to gain a holistic understanding of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems and extreme environments. Specific topics within the scope of the new JGR section include process-based studies of biogeochemistry, biogeophysics and global change, life in extreme environments, astrobiology, microbial processes, and evolutionary geobiology."

See http://www.agu.org/journals/jg/ for more details.

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION CONFERENCE (MBE) '05From the NAI Newsletter18 March 2005

The organizing committee for the MBE 05 would like to keep you informed on the details of the coming MBE 05 which will be held in Auckland, New Zealand at the Aotea Centre, June 19-23, 2005. It will highlight the latest

research at the interface of molecular biology and evolution, especially highlighting the work of Allan Wilson. It is the joint annual meeting of the International Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution and the Genetics Society of Australasia. We would appreciate if you can reply with your postal address so we could mail to you poster and postcard on the conference. For further details, our web site address is http://www.mbe05.com.

2005 ASGSB MEETING ANNOUNCEMENTAmerican Society for Gravitational and Space Biology release18 March 2005

The next ASGSB Annual Meeting will be held at the Reno Hilton Hotel in Reno, Nevada (Address: 2500 East Second Street, Reno, NV 89595; Phone:775/789-2000). Meeting dates are Tuesday, November 1, 2005, through Friday, November 4, 2005. Mark your calendars now, and watch for the meeting registration form in the Spring newsletter.

The hotel is offering the exceptional room rate of $79.00 plus tax per night. Be certain you indicate you are a member of the ASGSB when making your room reservations! The Reno Hilton is located near the Reno/Tahoe International Airport, which all major airlines serve, and is a short drive from beautiful Lake Tahoe.

You can obtain further information about the hotel at our Web site, http://www.asgsb.org. You can find the hotel Web site under "Reno Hilton" at http://www.caesars.com/Hilton/Reno/Hotel. You can also explore Reno through their visitor web site at http://www.cityofreno.com/vis.

CASSINI UPDATESNASA/JPL releases

Cassini Significant Events for 3-9 March 2005NASA/JPL release, 11 March 2005

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired today from the Goldstone tracking station. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. Information on the present position and speed of the Cassini spacecraft may be found on the "Present Position" web page located at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/present-position.cfm.

Science this week included outer magnetospheric survey observations performed by the entire suite of Magnetospheric and Plasma Science (MAPS) instruments, and a MAPS ring and satellite campaign to investigate the exchange of plasma, neutrals and dust between Saturn's ionosphere, rings, and the icy satellites in the inner magnetosphere. Optical remote sensing activities (ORS) included Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) observations of the E and G Rings, and Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) satellite orbit determination campaigns, feature tracks of Saturn's winds and clouds, and observations of the transit of Janus across Enceladus and Prometheus. ISS jointly participated with Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) to observe Dione, Enceladus, Mimas, Rhea and Tethys. Seven hours of ORS images of Rhea were obtained during a 136,000 km flyby along with an F-ring movie and brief imaging of Epimetheus and Iapetus.

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Thursday, March 3:

Uplink Operations sent commands to the spacecraft for a VIMS Fast Housekeeping overlay mini-sequence, Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) +Z Antenna Calibration, and transfer of VIMS Instrument expanded block files to the solid-state recorder. The targeting results from last week's Orbit Trim Maneuver (OTM)-15 are looking so good that there is a chance that the Navigation team will recommend canceling OTM-16, the Enceladus approach maneuver. The OTM-16 approval meeting is scheduled for Saturday at 1:00 PM Pacific time. Normally the Orbit Determination (OD) solution would not come out till the day before. Instead, Navigation is providing an early OD and pointing plots today. Plots with and without the OTM will be made available tonight for evaluation and feedback by Friday. Right now the plan is to redo the plots using the Friday afternoon OD as well.

Saturn's biggest and brightest moons are visible in this portrait by Cassini. Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is Saturn's largest moon and appears at the lower left. Note that some details in the moon's smoggy atmosphere are visible here. Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) is the planet's second largest moon and is seen above center. Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) has the brightest surface in the solar system, reflecting nearly all of the sunlight that falls upon it. Enceladus is just above the rings, right of center. Titan was on the far side of the planet at the time of this exposure, while the other moons were on the near side, much closer to Cassini. Also seen here are details in the cloud bands of Saturn's mostly hydrogen atmosphere, variations in brightness across the dazzling rings and magnificent ring shadows cast upon the northern hemisphere. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on February 5, 2005, at a distance of approximately 3.4 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Saturn through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 728 nanometers. The image scale is 200 kilometers (124 miles) per pixel.

Friday, March 4:

After receiving the expected OD solution today we re-did the plots. These are pretty much identical to yesterdays and to each other. There is now an 11:00 AM status meeting planned for Saturday where the ORS representatives may call in to check and comment if they are OK with canceling the maneuver. As of now the consensus is to cancel.

RPWS performed an 11.5-hour post-probe release antenna calibration today. The S11 Science Operations Plan Update process completed today. The sequence product was delivered to the sequence leads for the start of the Science and Sequence Update Process (SSUP) process on Tuesday. A lightning strike interrupted Cassini tracking from the DSN station #15 in Goldstone, California today. Station 26 was brought up in real-time to provide additional support.

Saturday, March 5:

Due to the very successful OTM-015, which executed this past week, OTM-016 was determined not to be necessary. Consequently, after reviewing the impacts to pointing for Enceladus and T4, we decided to cancel OTM-016. Ok, so why was all this so important and worth reporting? Pointing and targeting are very tightly controlled on Cassini. The instrument teams plan years in advance on what observations will be taken based on the proximity of the spacecraft to a target, and where we are pointing the spacecraft—and subsequently the instruments—at the time. If we cancel a maneuver, it will only be if there is virtually no change to pointing with, or without the maneuver, hence the importance of science involvement in this decision. OTM-15 put the spacecraft dead on where it needed to be to obtain the Enceladus observations. So, we cancelled OTM-16 and lightened the workload just a bit for a few folks.

The finest details on the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus are revealed in this 30-meter (100-foot) per-pixel, enhanced-color image taken during Cassini's closest-ever encounter with Enceladus on March 9, 2005. The surface of Enceladus is almost uniformly white and even though the natural color of this scene has been exaggerated in intensity, no obvious departure from the uniform hue is apparent. The image was also processed to enhance contrast while avoid saturation of the brightest parts of the scene. Hence, the surface does not have the brightness of fresh snow, as it would appear to the human eye. The Sun is illuminating the surface from the left of the image and at a low enough angle that the rugged ridge crests near upper left (which range in height from 50 to 100 meters or 164 to 328 feet) cast dramatic shadows, as at the top center of the image. The origin of the very small dark spots in the ridged terrain is uncertain. They could be shadows cast by small, building-sized outcrops (approximately 60-meter or 200-feett high) just at the limits of resolution. Monday, March 7:

We are getting ready for the Enceladus targeted flyby. Uplink Operations sent an Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer Enceladus Measurement program and a RADAR Enceladus Trigger Update to the spacecraft. Today the SOST hosted an Enceladus preview meeting to discuss science objectives and planned activities.

All parties have approved the Planetary Data System Data Product Software Interface Specification for the UVIS instrument. The UVIS archive development milestones are now complete.

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Tuesday, March 8:

Today we performed a Reaction Wheel momentum unload onboard the spacecraft. The S11 Science and Sequence Update Process (SSUP) kicked off today. In ten weeks the process will conclude and the new background sequence will be uplinked to Cassini. A picture of the large crater on Mimas was Astronomy Picture of the Day today.

As artful as it is informative, this captivating portrait captures Saturn's wispy moon Dione over the shoulder of smoggy Titan in a single inspiring scene. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across and Titan is 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) across. The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on February 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Dione and 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Titan. The image scale is 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel on Dione, and 13 kilometers (8 miles) per pixel on Titan.

Wednesday, March 9:

The Rev 4 Enceladus flyby today was the first targeted flyby of this icy moon. The closest approach distance was 500 km. Inbound, for about 7 hours, optical remote sensing measurements were made to probe the geologic history and composition of the surface of Enceladus, measure surface temperatures, and investigate whether a tenuous atmosphere exists. Ten minutes prior to closest approach, Cassini turned into a "safe spacecraft" attitude as it flew through the E-ring, the particle density of which is highest at the orbit of Enceladus.

This was Cassini's first pass through the central region of Saturn's E ring. The E ring is a widely distributed, diffuse ring dominated by very small particles which extend from the orbit of Mimas past Dione, about 3 to 8 Saturn radii, and thousands of kilometers above and below the ring plane. Near today's Enceladus flyby, the spacecraft oriented its High Gain Antenna into the incoming particle direction to protect it from any large material that may be in the centermost section of the E ring. Analysis to see if any large particles struck the antenna is currently underway. No spacecraft effects during this crossing have been observed.

After the E-ring crossing, only a crescent of Enceladus was illuminated, allowing for key measurements to characterize any thermal activity and surface temperatures. RADAR performed scatterometry and radiometry measurements to understand ice "cleanliness." Along with the Enceladus flyby, Cassini flew within ~85,000 km of Enceladus' neighbor Tethys, providing the opportunity for optical remote sensing observations of that moon.

Cassini Finds an Atmosphere on Saturn's Moon EnceladusNASA/JPL release 2005-046, 16 March 2005

The Cassini spacecraft's two close flybys of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus have revealed that the moon has a significant atmosphere. Scientists, using Cassini's magnetometer instrument for their studies, say the source may be volcanism, geysers, or gases escaping from the surface or the interior. When Cassini had its first encounter with Enceladus on February 17 at an altitude of

1,167 kilometers (725 miles), the magnetometer instrument saw a striking signature in the magnetic field. On March 9, Cassini approached to within 500 kilometers (310 miles) of Enceladus’ surface and obtained additional evidence.

This artist concept shows the detection of an atmosphere on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. The Cassini magnetometer instrument is designed to measure the magnitude and direction of the magnetic fields of Saturn and its moons. During Cassini's two close flybys of Enceladus—February 17 and March 9—the instrument detected a bending of the magnetic field around Enceladus. The graphic shows the magnetic field observed by Cassini along its trajectory plotted in a vector form. Even though the spacecraft altitude was almost 500 kilometers (310 miles) at closest approach and the flyby was upstream of the moon (where the interaction is expected to be weaker) Cassini's magnetometer observed bending of the magnetic field consistent with its draping around a conducting object, which indicates that the Saturnian plasma is being diverted away from an extended atmosphere.

The observations showed a bending of the magnetic field, with the magnetospheric plasma being slowed and deflected by the moon. In addition, magnetic field oscillations were observed. These are caused when electrically charged (or ionized) molecules interact with the magnetic field by spiraling around the field line. This interaction creates characteristic oscillations in the magnetic field at frequencies that can be used to identify the molecule. The observations from the Enceladus flybys are believed to be due to ionized water vapor. "These new results from Cassini may be the first evidence of gases originating either from the surface or possibly from the interior of Enceladus," said Dr. Michele Dougherty, principal investigator for theCassini magnetometer, and professor at Imperial College in London. In1981, NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew by Enceladus at a distance of 90,000 kilometers (56,000 miles) without detecting an atmosphere. Its possible detection was beyond Voyager’s capabilities, or something may have changed since that flyby. This is the first time since Cassini arrived in orbit around Saturn last summer that an atmosphere has been detected around a moon of Saturn, other than its largest moon, Titan. Enceladus is a relatively small moon. The amount of gravity it exerts is not enough to hold an atmosphere very long. Therefore, at Enceladus, a strong continuous source is required to maintain the atmosphere. The need for such a strong source leads scientists to consider eruptions, such as volcanoes and geysers. If such eruptions are present, Enceladus would join two other such active moons, Io at Jupiter and Triton at Neptune. “Enceladus could be Saturn’s more benign counterpart to Jupiter’s dramatic Io,” said Dr. Fritz Neubauer, co-investigator for the Cassini magnetometer, and a professor at the University of Cologne in Germany. Since the Voyager flyby, scientists have suspected that this moon is geologically active and is the source of Saturn's icy E ring. Enceladus is the most reflective object in the solar system, reflecting about 90 percent of the sunlight that hits it. If Enceladus does have ice volcanoes, the high

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reflectivity of the moon's surface might result from continuous deposition of icy particles originating from the volcanoes. Enceladus' diameter is about 500 kilometers (310 miles), which would fit in the state of Arizona. Yet despite its small size, Enceladus exhibits one of the most interesting surfaces of all the icy satellites.

This infrared color image of Enceladus was obtained by the Cassini visual infrared mapping spectrometer on March 9, 2005, when the Cassini spacecraft was 9,145 kilometers (5,716 miles) away from Enceladus. Enceladus shows substantial differences in composition or, more likely, particle size on its surface. Redder areas correspond to larger grain sizes, and appear to be correlated with craters and ridged regions. The surface of Enceladus is nearly pure water ice; no other components have been identified yet. The middle of the image is located at the equator near a longitude of 210 degrees. The image is about 100 kilometers (63 miles) square. The image shows the ratio of reflected light at 1.34 and 1.52 microns, wavelengths that are not visible to the human eye.

For images and information on the Cassini mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter.

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

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/enceladus_atmosphere_050316.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05zg.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050314littlemoons.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050316enceladus.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050316crackedface.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050316enceladuscolor.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/enceladus_atmosphere.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/faces_hyperion.html

DIAGNOSTIC TESTS PLANNED FOR INSTRUMENT ON MARS ROVERNASA/JPL release 2005-04515 March 2005 NASA has suspended use of one of the mineral-identifying tools on the Opportunity Mars rover while experts troubleshoot a problem with getting data from the instrument, the robot's miniature thermal emission spectrometer. "As always, our first priority is to protect the instrument, so we have turned it off while we plan diagnostic tests," said Jim Erickson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project. "Opportunity's other instruments are healthy and providing excellent science, and Spirit's entire instrument suite is working well and being kept busy by the science team."

At the Gusev site recently, skies have been very dusty, and on its 421st sol (March 10, 2005) NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit spied two dust devils in action. This image is from the rover's rear hazard-avoidance camera. Image credit: NASA/JPL.

Both Opportunity and Spirit, its twin, have been examining Mars since January 2004, more than four times as long as their successful three-month primary missions. While researchers work to diagnose the spectrometer-data problem and seek the best way to mend it or work around it, Opportunity is continuing its journey and observing a crater called "Vostok." On the other side of the planet, meanwhile, martian winds have revealed themselves as dust devils in new images from Spirit and caused mixed effects on the rover itself, depositing dust on a camera and removing dust from solar panels. On March 3 and 4, Opportunity transmitted data sets for 17 successful readings by its miniature thermal emission spectrometer but also reported that eight other attempted readings yielded incomplete data sets. This spectrometer, from high on the rover's mast, observes rocks and other targets from afar. It measures the infrared radiation they emit in 167 different wavelengths, providing information about the targets' composition. Two other types of spectrometers, mounted on the rover's robotic arm, provide additional information about composition when the rover is close enough to touch the target.

At the Gusev site recently, skies have been very dusty, and on its 421st sol (March 10, 2005) NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit spied two dust devils in action. This is an image from the rover's navigation camera. Image credit: NASA.

Researchers are considering several possible root causes for the spectrometer-data problem. One possibility is malfunctioning of an optical switch that tells a mirror in the instrument when to begin moving. Another is that the mirror is not properly moving at a constant velocity. "If it is the optical switch, we could use a redundant one built into the instrument," said Dr. Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, Tempe, lead scientist for the miniature thermal emission spectrometers on both rovers. He added that, if the root cause cannot be remedied, scientists could still get useful data from the instrument in its currently impaired condition. Even a total loss of the miniature thermal emission spectrometer would not end the rover's usefulness. In fact, NASA took a calculated risk by disabling this instrument on Opportunity 10 months ago, though the current problem appears unrelated to potential damage anticipated then. At that time, rover

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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 10, 21 March 2005

operators began using a "deep sleep" technique to conserve energy on Opportunity during reduced-sunshine months of Mars' winter. Turning off power to overnight heaters let the instrument get cold enough to possibly damage its beam-splitter. However, the spectrometer kept working through the coldest months. Christensen said, "What we're seeing now does not appear to be any problem with the beam-splitter."

This picture from the microscopic imager on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is a mosaic of a target called "Gagarin" on a rock referred to as "Yuri." Opportunity brushed the target with the rock abrasion tool during the rover's 401st martian day, or sol, (March 10, 2005) and then took the individual images that are combined into this mosaic. The rock abrasion tool ground into the same target on the following sol. The circle from which the tool's wire brush has scoured dust off the rock surface is about 5 centimeters (2 inches) in diameter. This rock is near the rim of "Vostok" crater. Yuri Gagarin was the first man to orbit Earth. The Russian cosmonaut's spacecraft was named Vostok 1. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/USGS.

The rover team is not restricting use of Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer while troubleshooting the problem on Opportunity. Spirit's work capabilities grew with a sudden jump in output from solar panels on March 9, which caused the daily power supply to double. In a possibly related development three days earlier, some dust appeared to have blown onto lenses of Spirit's front hazard-avoidance camera, enough for slight mottling in images from both the left and right eyes of the stereo camera, but not enough to affect the usefulness of the camera. Mottling in left-eye images cleared markedly the same day the power increased. Team members speculated that Spirit's power boost, like similar ones on Opportunity in October, resulted from wind removing some accumulated dust from solar panels. Spirit captured pictures of dust-lofting whirlwinds on March 10, adding evidence for windy local conditions. Images the next day showed solar panels cleaned of most of their dust buildup. Opportunity's rear hazard-avoidance camera picked up some dust contamination three months ago. The dust on it has not affected operations and has neither decreased nor increased perceptibly since first noticed. No dust has contaminated lenses of the navigation cameras or panoramic cameras on either rover. From all cameras combined, the rovers have returned more than 72,000 images. Images and other geological data from Spirit and Opportunity are successfully providing unprecedented evidence about wet environmental conditions in Mars' past. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has managed NASA's Mars Exploration Rover project since it began in 2000. Images and additional information about the rovers and their discoveries are available on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mer_main.html and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov.

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

Dolores Beasley NASA Headquarters, Washington, DCPhone: 202-358-1753

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.space.com/news/050315_rover_problem.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05z.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05za.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zb.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zc.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zd.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/050314dustdevil.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/050315minites.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/rover_dust_devil.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/opportunity_minites_fails.html

MARS EXPRESS STATUS REPORT—FEBRUARY 2005ESA release10 March 2005

Mission Status

The last quarter of 2004 was largely a very productive period of science data taking, except for a 1-week period around early-December, during which an anomaly with the Solid State Mass Memory (SSMM) prevented nominal operations, and some antenna problems towards end-December. The SSMM anomaly, which occurred twice in a row, is most probably understood and can be fixed with a software patch. Early 2005 saw a repeat, twice within a few days, of an anomaly in the Solar Array Drive Electronics (SADE), reporting a solar array movement not in-line with the commanded movement.

The planning of science observations for the 2005 eclipse season (starting in January) is very complicated with difficult trade-offs between power margins required and requests for science observations being made continuously. The first eclipses of this eclipse season show a thermal and power behavior fully in line with expectations.

The JPL/ASTRO report on the MARSIS boom deployment behavior has been received; followed by a report from industry (ASTRIUM) analyzing the potential risks to the satellite and the mission. An independent team of experts is evaluating all of these reports and a first review meeting has been planned for 24 January 2005. A decision on the deployment, and its possible date, should follow soon thereafter.

Operations and archiving

Science operations are proceeding well. Illumination conditions are still favouring optical- and spectro-imaging observations. Following an upgrade of the NASA DSS-14 (Goldstone 70 m dish) station, it took longer than expected to declare the station ready again for normal operations. Mars Express had no other option than to choose to use the station while in "engineering demo" mode. This meant a fairly large number of unrecoverable data gaps occurred.

The next independent Mars Express Science Archive Review will be held on 26-27 January at ESTEC. This review will focus on the readiness for public release of the archive and actions taken to fix a number of items flagged at the July 2004 review.

Science highlights

Some 300 abstracts have been received in response to the call for papers for the dedicated Mars Express Science Conference, which will take place at ESTEC on 21-25 February 2005. A paper was published in Nature on a study of the time-stratigraphic relationships of volcanic and glacial structures in unprecedented detail. This provides insight into the geological evolution of Mars. It is shown that calderas on five major volcanoes on Mars have undergone repeated activation and resurfacing during the last 20 per cent of martian history, with phases of activity as young as two million years, suggesting that the volcanoes are potentially still active today. Glacial deposits at the base of the Olympus Mons escarpment show evidence for repeated phases of activity as recently as about four million years ago. Morphological evidence is found that snow and ice deposition on the Olympus construct at elevations of more than 7000 meters led to episodes of glacial activity at this height. Even today, water ice protected by an insulating layer of dust may be present at high altitudes on Olympus Mons.

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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 10, 21 March 2005

Read the original news release at http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=36798.

MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGESNASA/JPL/MSSS release10-16 March 2005

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

Collapse Features (Released 10 March 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/03/10/

Meridiani Valleys (Released 11 March 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/03/11/

Eumenides Dorsum Yardangs (Released 12 March 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/03/12/

Exhumed Flows (Released 13 March 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/03/13/

North Polar Dunes (Released 14 March 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/03/14/

Mars at Ls 176 Degrees (Released 15 March 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/03/15/

Sirenum Troughs (Released 16 March 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/03/16/

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

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

MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGESNASA/JPL/ASU release14-18 March 2005

Eos Chasma Mensa (Released 14 March 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050314a.html

Olympus Mons Mensa (Released 15 March 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050315a.html

Shabatana Vallis Chaos (Released 16 March 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050316a.html

Hydraotes Chaos (Released 17 March 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050317a.html

Candor Chasma Chaos (Released 18 March 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050318a.html All of the THEMIS images are archived at http://themis.la.asu.edu/latest.html.

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

Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

ROSETTA: REPORT ON EARTH FLYBY (25 FEBRUARY TO 11 MARCH 2005)ESA release14 March 2005

The reporting period covers the critical activities around the first Earth swing-by of the Rosetta mission. All activities were successfully carried out, including operations of the spacecraft and payload in proximity of the Earth and the first in-flight test of the Asteroid Flyby Mode using the Moon as a target. The spacecraft was gradually configured for the Earth swing-by, including activation of the fourth Reaction Wheel on 25 February, switching of the RF link from X-band to S-band on 27 February, and on 2 March from High Gain to Low Gain antenna, etc.

Rosetta's view of Earth. Image credit: ESA.

On 1st March the first payload instruments were activated: RPC and Lander ROMAP. These were followed by MIRO and VIRTIS on 4 March. SREM was always active in the background. Lander/CIVA was operated for three hours around Earth closest approach.

The Earth swing-by operations included various open-loop tracking tests with the Navigation Cameras, using the Moon as target, on 4 March. All operations were successful, with the exception of a problem in configuring the link between Camera B and the on-board Mass Memor, preventing pictures taken by this camera to be stored on-board.

After closest approach with the Earth (at an altitude of 1954 km at 22:09 on 4th March), the spacecraft was commanded at 01:00 on 5 March into Asteroid Flyby Mode, using the Navigation Camera pointed on the Moon to control the attitude. This was the first and only in-flight test opportunity for this mode, which will be used operationally during the actual flyby of the asteroids Steins in 2008 and Lutetia in 2010. The test lasted 9 hours and was fully successful. After the end of the test the spacecraft was pointed back to Earth to allow payload instruments and the Navigation Cameras to take Earth pictures from a rapidly growing distance of about 250,000 km.

After the swing-by the RF link was configured back to S-band on High Gain Antenna on 6 March, and the new Earth pointing attitude initiated on 8 March. On the payload side, VIRTIS was switched off on 5 March, MIRO, Lander ROMAP and RPC on 7 March. ALICE was activated in various slots on 8 and 9 March. The downlink of all generated science data was completed on 10 March.

At a Science Working Team meeting at ESOC on 8 and 9 March the Rosetta Principal Investigators presented preliminary results of their instruments' operations during this phase. The overall performance of the instruments was very good and good scientific and calibration data could be collected both by the remote sensing and the plasma instruments active around Earth swing-by.

Daily New Norcia passes were taken, and as from 27 February priority of coverage was returned to Rosetta until 10 March, in support of the orbit manoeuvres and to increase tracking data recovery for precise orbit determination. For the same reason, daily DSN passes were taken (typically 4 hours each).

Read the original news release at http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=36808.

End Marsbugs, Volume 12, Number 10.

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