The Mars Science Laboratory — nicknamed Curiosity — and will be the fourth rover to traverse the surface of Mars.

This NASA photo shows the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, during testing June 3 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

One of the most sophisticated space vehicles ever made inches along the rocky landscape, aluminum wheels grinding like a spoon in a garbage disposal.

Here in the Mars Yard at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, what passes for the Red Planet looks like a vacant lot in Hesperia. The vehicle being tested, a replica of the latest Mars rover that will soon be crawling around up there, looks like a giant mechanical insect — six wheeled legs, an articulating arm and a pair of blue camera lenses like eyes peering from a boxy head.

On Friday, NASA's most ambitious Mars rover mission to date is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., aboard an Atlas V rocket. It's a $2.5 billion gamble scientists hope will give unparalleled insights into how Mars evolved and whether it ever could have supported life.T

The Mars Science Laboratory — nicknamed Curiosity — was developed at JPL in La Canada Flintridge, Calif., and will be the fourth rover to traverse the planet's harsh terrain. But unlike the earlier Mars rovers — Sojourner, Spirit and the still-cruising Opportunity — Curiosity will do more than look for evidence of water.

Curiosity is a robot astrobiologist. During a mission expected to last at least two years, the rover will use a battery of scientific instruments to analyze Mars' geology and atmosphere, looking for the elements and chemical compounds that are the building blocks of life.

Scientists hope the information Curiosity gathers will exponentially increase their understanding of Mars and bring us closer to answering the most profound and tantalizing of questions: Could life exist beyond Earth?

"Humans are hard-wired to want to know the answer to that," said Bill Nye, executive director of the Planetary Society, the Pasadena, Calif.-based nonprofit that advocates for space exploration. "If we found life on Mars, it would change everybody's view of our place in space."

Curiosity will take 8.5 months to travel the 354 million miles to Mars — and two years to cover about 14 miles of its surface.

The rover is expected to land Aug. 5 near the Martian equator inside Gale crater, a chasm about the combined size of Connecticut and Rhode Island, with a three-mile-high mountain of layered sedimentary rock at its bottom.

Scientists believe the crater, thought to date back billions of years to when Mars was warm and wet, will reveal the planet's evolutionary story the way the Grand Canyon's strata expose the history of Earth.

"It's going to be like reading a novel — and it's a long one," said John Grotzinger, the project's chief scientist. "It's going to be a wild journey looking into the guts of the history of Mars."

If Curiosity were a car, it would be advertised as fully loaded: six aluminum wheels that can be steered independently. A mounted laser to vaporize rock. Seventeen cameras, to take high-definition images, make scientific measurements and navigate the rover. A robotic arm to drill into rock and scoop up samples. Instruments to detect in those samples organic compounds and elements associated with life on Earth.

And under the hood: a nuclear-powered engine that will give Curiosity a top crawling speed of 2 inches per second.

A big load to land

All that hardware gives the rover a curb weight of a ton. That's five times heavier than its predecessor, which bounced along the Martian surface nestled inside huge protective air bags before coming to rest, like a beach ball tossed from a low-flying airplane.

"The air bags needed to land Curiosity would have been two or three times the weight of the rover itself," said Adam Steltzner, a JPL engineer in charge of ensuring the rover lands in one piece. "There's no landing rocket that could have handled that weight."

So Steltzner's team has engineered an innovative, multi-staged system that, unlike the beach-ball approach, will use sensors and advanced computer software to guide Curiosity's descent to a relatively pinpoint landing.

As planned, the craft carrying the rover will hit Mars' atmosphere at 13,000 mph. Thruster rockets will slow and steer the craft, positioning it for landing. At about 1,000 mph, a parachute will deploy and slam on the brakes. Finally, a "sky crane" will emerge from the craft's descent stage and gently lower a tethered Curiosity to the ground.

All this in just six minutes.

"It looks kind of crazy. And it's definitely novel," Steltzner said. "But we believe it to be a very simple process." The Curiosity rover is one of most complex projects in NASA's history. It's also $900 million over budget and two years late.

An audit released earlier this year by NASA's inspector general criticized managers for repeatedly underestimating the cost of working around the project's numerous technological hurdles — a common complaint of the agency through the years.

All this comes at a time of budget cutting at NASA and a lack of consensus among scientists and politicians as to where the U.S. space program ought to devote dwindling dollars.

"If this fails, it's going to be a disaster," said Nye of the Planetary Society. "Congress will become ever less trusting of the true costs of these missions and the ability of the people doing it."

But Nye says the 26-month delay has a huge upside: It reduced the risk of failure.
"Everyone involved is working very hard to make sure that this succeeds," he said.

The sky-crane landing system is key to a more ambitious future mission: a planned partnership with the European Space Agency to send a rover to collect rock and soil on Mars and cache the samples for an eventual return to Earth.

"There's no such thing as a perfect landing system on Mars," said Steve Squyres, lead scientist for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. "It's a highly unpredictable environment. It's always possible that a gust of wind or a pointy rock could ruin your day."

Over the last 50 years, more orbiters, probes and rovers have been flung at Mars than any other corner of the cosmos except our moon.

Getting there hasn't been easy. About half of the dozens of spacecraft sent to Mars have either malfunctioned, crashed or disappeared.

Because it's the only planet in our solar system that could have sponsored life — the rest are too hot, too cold or made of gas — public expectations of early trips to Mars were so high that the results seemed disappointing even when the missions succeeded.

In the years since, Mars missions have methodically built a scientifically rigorous portrait of the planet that offer insights on Earth's early history and future.

With this in mind, JPL scientists are downplaying the likelihood that Curiosity might actually find organic matter — a key ingredient for life. Finding conditions that would signal that Mars once could have supported life would be breathtaking in itself.

"You can't promise more than you can deliver. That's what happened" before, said Grotzinger, the mission's chief scientist, a geologist new to the space game.

As wet sediment hardens to rock, organic material is destroyed. Finding even a shred of the stuff in early Earth rocks is extremely rare, Grotzinger said.

"This is like looking for a needle in haystack — and the haystack is the size of Mars," he said. "But that doesn't mean we won't try."

"Of the hundreds of places we could have landed, we've chosen the best place to find habitable environmen. Now we'll see if we find one."

If you think that people who believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life are kooks, you probably haven't talked to a NASA space scientist in a while.

At a news conference on Thursday, Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars program for NASA, said that when the agency's newest Mars rover blasts off for the red planet on Nov. 25, one of its charges will be to discover if the planet contains (or contained) the ingredients of life.

"This mission will bridge the gap scientifically from our understanding of the planet being warmer and wetter than we probably believed, to not seeking life itself, but seeking signs of life," he said.

He reiterated: "This is not a life-seeking mission."

Think about the mission this way: If NASA were going to Mars looking for signs of pancakes instead of signs of life, on this trip it would be looking for flour and eggs, not pancake crumbs -- and definitely not pancakes.

In an interview with The Times, Joy Crisp, deputy project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory, said the rover will be looking for organic molecules and isotopic signatures that might indicate that life did exist at one time on Mars.

"If this step pans out, if we do find organic compounds and we think that the rocks look likely to preserve evidence of life, then we will know better what to send next," she said. "It is kind of an intermediate step."

Asfor the rover itself -- called Curiosity -- it's 6-feet-tall, weighs roughly 2,000 pounds, and is the most complex machine to be placed on another planet, according to McCuistion.

The rover has high-definition cameras, a laser eye, and a weather station to help scientists monitor the environment. It also has the ability to sample rocks and soils, and a drill that will allow it to capture material from inside rocks.

"This is a Mars scientist dream machine," said Ashwin Vasavada, Mars Science Laboratory deputy project scientist, at the news event.

But the rover won't be landing on the planet for a while. Curiosity is scheduled to leave Earth on Nov. 25 (the day after Thanksgiving), but it won't be landing on Mars until August 2012.

During the news conference, Vasavada was asked how likely he thought it was that Curiosity would find evidence of life on Mars.

"That would be in the realm of speculation," he said, "but the reason we are excited about Mars is that when we look into the distant past, there is evidence of rivers flowing and lakes and we are trying to find out if they are habitable environments."

Martian Life's Last Stand in the Trenches?

Scientists have found water-bearing deposits on Mars that are out of step with what was happening elsewhere on the planet, raising the prospect that the sites could have hosted Martian life's last stand.

The deposits are a type of clay called smectites, which contain a blend of silica with aluminum, iron or magnesium. They form in the presence of water.

The deposits were found in an unlikely locale -- roughly 30 feet up from the ground inside two troughs in Noctis Labyrinthus ("the labyrinth of the night"), a maze-like system of deep valleys located near the western end of the massive Valles Marineris canyon that cuts across the face of Mars.

19 September 1955: Plant Life on Mars?

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 19 September 1955

The sudden appearance of a large dark spot on the surface of the planet Mars was announced yesterday by the National Geographic Society in Washington. It was also claimed that this discovery supported the conclusion "that Mars is not a dead world, that the darkening is due to the growth of plant life." The observation has been made by Dr E. C. Slipher, the director of the Lowell Observatory, in South Africa.

Dr Slipher has spent a large part of his long life (he is nearly 80) photographing the surface of Mars.

This event is certainly remarkable, but it is unlikely that scientists will accept the suggestion that the appearance of this spot is evidence of vegetable life on the planet. Professor Znedik Kopal of Manchester University said last night that the claim "must be taken with a pinch of salt." The difficulty is that there are at least two ways of accounting for the appearance of dark spots on the surface of the planet and simple photography of them cannot decide between the two theories.

It is, however, clear that the dark spots must be produced by some active mechanism. Most of the surface of the planet is covered with a thick layer of sandy dust (it is a desert), and it is known that winds with speeds of several miles a second blow in the thin Martian atmosphere. Any dark material on the surface would rapidly become covered with a thin layer of obscuring dust if there were not some way in which it was regenerated.

The assumption that the dark patches are areas of vegetation has been common, for several decades. The difficulty is to see how any vegetation could grow in the planet's strange atmosphere.

The most favoured of the alternative theories is that the dark spots are caused by volcanic activity. Each black area would be brought about by pumice dust from an active volcano falling on the sandy desert and concealing it from view. This supposes that the volcanoes remain active for a considerable length of time, but there is no direct way of proving or disproving this.

To distinguish between these theories experiments are now being carried out in several laboratories throughout the world. In the end the question will be decided by the colour of the light which the spots reflect. When accurate measurements of the proportions of red, blue, and yellow light from the spots are available, these will be compared with laboratory measurements of the light reflected from pumice, lava, and vegetation. The prize will go to that material which best simulates the behaviour of the spots.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

WHO WAS Dr. E.C. Slipher?

Earl Carl Slipher was born on a farm near Mulberry, Indiana on March 25, 1883. He began his higher education at Indiana University, where he received his B.A. degree in 1906 and his M.A. degree in 1908. He earned this M.A. through the Laurence Fellowship, which allowed him to work toward his master's degree at Lowell Observatory from 1906 to 1908. He received honorary LL.D degrees from the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University in 1960.
Slipher began his lifelong career as a planetary astronomer in 1907 when he observed Mars during an expedition to the Andes led by David Todd and supported by Percival Lowell. He became an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in 1908. At this institution, he became one of the first people to use multiple image printing, in which several images taken in close succession are superimposed onto one photographic plate in order to improve the information content in any given picture. In 1918, he became one of the first people to standardize his photographic plates for photometric measures, a procedure which is now universally used.
In 1939, 1954 and 1956, Slipher led expeditions to the Lamont-Hussey Observatory at Blemfontein, South Africa in order to observe Mars while it was in opposition. He was also instrumental in organizing the International Mars Committee (1954), which was designed to coordinate observatories around the world in order to observe Mars continuously for several months before and after an opposition. In 1960, Slipher headed an United States Air Force project designed to update the techniques used to observe Mars. Slipher was also the acting director of Lowell Observatory from January 3rd, 1957 until September 1958.
Slipher did not, however, limit his activities to the confines of Lowell Observatory. He was the mayor of Flagstaff (1918-1920), a Flagstaff city council member (1917), a State Legislature member (from which position he resigned in 1933), and a member of the Flagstaff draft board (1940-1945).

E.C. Slipher died in Flagstaff, Arizona on August 7, 1964 at the age of 81

NASA Selects University of Texas at Arlington chemistry professor's technology to determine if there is life on Mars.

This schematic diagram of an ion chromatography run depicts how elution time correlates to output peak data. Diagram courtesy of Madison Area Technical College. Copyright 2006 by the Biotechnology Project at MATC.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration believes that a University of Texas at Arlington chemistry professor's technology may hold the key for determining whether life could exist on Mars and could even help humans explore the Red Planet someday.

Purnendu "Sandy" Dasgupta has been awarded a $1.2 million grant to develop an ion chromatograph that is durable enough to withstand extraterrestrial extremes and sensitive enough to pick out differences between ions.

"He's developed a new system for testing the chemical composition of the soil on Mars," said Pamela Jansma, dean of UTA's College of Science. "We don't understand much about Martian soil, so for any kind of new technology to be able to adapt to the conditions of the Martian surface is new."

An ion chromatograph separates and detects ions, which are atoms or molecules bearing an electrical charge. The device can identify a broad range of ions.

"By creating an easily portable and robustly designed ion chromatograph, we're hoping to rapidly expand scientists' knowledge of extraterrestrial geology and geochemistry," Dasgupta stated. "With this machine, we should be able to unequivocally answer if organic ions are present."

Finding organic ions in Martian soil could lead to identifying organic compounds, which are necessary for life to exist.

Dasgupta's project was one of eight nationwide to be funded recently by grants from NASA's astrobiology program.

"Every scientist deep down is fascinated with the solar system and curious about whether there's life elsewhere," Jansma said. "This type of research captivates people."

Dasgupta will design and build an open tubular ion chromatograph that weighs no more than 3 kilograms. Researchers and students will test it in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the most arid, barren places on Earth.

After that, they'll refine the machine for use on Mars.

Dasgupta's collaborators on the project include professors from Texas Tech and Tufts universities and a NASA research scientist.

The four-year time frame is a plus to students: "As it goes from conceptual stages to the prototype to field research, you can really see the process associated with research and development," Jansma said. "Students can really see it from start to finish. How exciting to have something that is intended to go another planet."

"It's enough time to take undergraduate and graduate students, involve them in an innovative project, and then they can use what they're doing for their graduate research," Jansma said. "It's also broad enough and of sufficient interest to so many people."

Some typical applications of ion chromatography include:
•Drinking water analysis for pollution and other constituents
•Determination of water chemistries in aquatic ecosystems
•Determination of sugar and salt content in foods
•Isolation of select proteins


Current research in the Dasgupta group include:

Chip-scale instruments,
Novel detection and data transform schemes in chromatography,
Iodine nutrition of women and infants and the effects of perchlorate thereon,
Development of iodine and Selenium analyzers,
Green analysis of arsenic in drinking water,
Measurement of cyanide in saliva, blood, and breath towards rapid treatment of cyanide poisoning,
Rapid analysis of trace heavy metals in atmospheric aerosol to act as conservative tracers,
Absolute Charge detection in solution and its many ramifications.



The research in the Dasgupta lab is targeted towards finding the best solution to a problem and is not married to any specific technique. Laboratory-built instrumentation are as commonly used as commercial chromatographs, mass spectrometers, etc. and are often preferred.

Students are necessarily trained in electronics and computer-interfacing and writing appropriate instrument control/data acquisition software. We foster builders, not users.

NASA Wants to Know What You Think: Was there Life on Mars?

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http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=17076&post=92453&uid=54971236771#post92453

The search for life on Mars – MOD involved in mission sims via PLRP

September 12th, 2011
by Chris Bergin, NASA
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2011/09/search-life-mars-mod-involved-mission-sims-via-plrp/

NASA’s Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) are continuing to expand their involvement in exploration training and simulation by working with the international Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) team on multi-hour missions – a precursor to deep space exploration missions, which will one day involve humans searching for signs of life on Mars.


PLRP – which began in 2008 – is a NASA and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) analog research program, which is ramping up its work in 2011 via the addition of new scientific, operational and technological objectives to its busy ten-day field deployment.

The Project is unique in focusing on both science and scientific operations research in the underwater environment of Kelly Lake, British Columbia, Canada. The PLRP team use DeepWorker submersible vehicles to explore, study and document rare freshwater carbonate rock formations that thrive in this lake, which in turn provides mission training opportunities for future deep space exploration.

The team are working on conducting safe, productive and discovery-based science in extreme environments. It is this knowledge that will form the basis of future exploration concepts for human research voyages to such destinations as near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and Mars.

This training not only allows for gaining experience in conducting the science, but also utilizing it to ask one of the most important questions which exploration is being tasked with – the potential finding of proof there was once life on Mars.

“The Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) is a NASA and CSA sponsored international, multidisciplinary, science and exploration effort to explain the origin of freshwater microbial in BC, Canada,” noted the August MOD presentation (available on L2). “Data trends provides information to identify signatures of ancient life on our own and other planets (for example Mars).”

The 60 strong team will be deeply involved in seven days of tasks, all tied into the upcoming October work to be conducted by the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) mission, along with the ongoing work being carried out by NASA’s Desert Research and Technology Studies (RATS) – both of which also now have MOD involvement.

“Single person submarines, scuba divers and other watercraft are used in around five hour exploration missions over seven days. Real time voice and video transmitted to science backroom team, CAPCOM, Flight Director and planning team in MCC (Mission Control Center),” added the presentation, showing where the MOD involvement will be, which includes a mobile, onsite, MCC.

“Provides an analog to human exploration missions (Mars or Asteroid) through methods developed at Pavilion & Kelly Lakes. Testing and simulating deep space communications and protocols.

Prototyping timeline viewer. Developing operational techniques. For the 2011 field season, customer requested real time planning support and a planning product for team situational awareness.”

As predicted by MOD Director Paul Hill, the team’s world class “Plan Train Fly (PTF)” approach is the obvious choice for such current missions, especially in light of MOD’s continued role in the end product, an actual deep space exploration mission.

Implemented MOD model of PLAN, TRAIN, FLY.

"PLAN: Developed a customer specific timeline and customized planning viewer for use on mobile devices (pre-mission, started Apr. 2011). Current ISS tools (Score) as a backbone for project specific planning products. Score Mobile (developed by ARC) at Kelly Lake as test bed for other exploration analogs,” listed the presentation.

“TRAIN: Inspired scientists to adopt an operational mindset. Introduced the roll of Flight Director and trained scientists to be Flight Directors. Instructed on uses of planning products. Instructed on communications techniques.

“FLY: Real time planning support through out the day’s ops. Improved efficiency of pilot time or resources. Provided situational awareness for all PLRP team members through Score Mobile. Assisted testing operations concepts in a NEA exploration environments (test bed for other analogs). Expanded operational knowledge base on maximizing science in exploration missions. Education and outreach.

With the PLRP team launching new tools – such as the Exploration Ground Data Systems developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center – the teams will be able to rapidly synthesize, manage and analyze large data sets, as well as plan and manage flight scheduling.

These tools also will be used to manage the “delayed communications” research that will build 50-second communication delays between the submarine pilot and the mission operations crew to simulate what it is like conducting science on asteroids with human explorers.

This “delayed comm” element is being utilized in MOD’s involvement with NEEMO and the Desert Rats.

MOD and PLRP will also use the new planning tools to better manage a dynamic and complex operations schedule, as well as gain a new degree of situational awareness about all field camp activities, with MOD sharing their expertise and experience gained from supporting mission operations for the space shuttle and International Space Station.

“Pushed the limits of current ISS tools in an exploration based environment. Developed prototype of timeline viewer tool (Score Mobile) for exploration missions. Kelly Lake 2011 field season used as test bed for other analogs,” added the MOD overview on their own benefits from being involved in the PLRP mission.

“Feeds into Next Gen viewer (NGPS). Demonstrated ability to provide operational services to a customer using the MOD model of Plan, Train, Fly. Grew knowledge base in order to provide better products and services to our future customers.

MOD also note that future work may include collaboration to incorporate a ‘Field Astronaut’ training concept for an ISS science experiment (ISTAR collaboration).

This year’s PLRP field team also includes a member from Google, who will help the team evolve its use of mapping activities and develop cutting-edge data integration platforms based on Google Earth.

NASA information added that in addition to achieving its science and technology goals, this year’s field test also will provide local teachers an opportunity to learn how a lake in their community will be used to train astronauts and scientists and prepare them for space exploration.

As previously summarized in the NEEMO overview, the first deep space exploration mission is likely to be to an asteroid, with the end goal set up for a crewed mission to Mars.

Mars Mission:

With the well-known uncertainty surrounding the long-term goals of the space program, no definitive mission planning has been created for a Mars mission. However, the post-Augustine Commission “Flexible Path” overviews did show what remains the only expansive review into a Mars mission outline of late.

Per the internal Flexible Path presentation – available on L2, and summarized in several articles – numerous HLVs (Heavy Lift Launch Vehicles – such as the Space Launch System) would launch the elements of the Mars Transport Vehicle (MTV) for assembly in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – of which there are several notional designs, all modular in appearance.

As overviewed in the presentation, a crew would undertake a mission of up to 650 days, with the opening target likely to be the Mars moon, Phobos.

“A human Mars Orbit/Phobos Mission represents an intermediate step between human exploration missions in near-Earth space and human missions to explore the surface of Mars,” opened the expansive section on the manned missions to Mars/Phobos.

“Key features could include demonstration of in-space hardware elements designed for Mars missions while accomplishing scientific and exploration objectives both at Mars and on Phobos.”

Such short-stay missions range from 550-650 days, with 30 to 40 days in the vicinity of Mars. Over 95 percent of the total mission time is spent in the deep-space interplanetary environment with the balance spent in the vicinity of Mars.

The reason Phobos is the likely first target of a Mars mission shows relevance to the science collection efforts being simulated by the missions taking place this year on Earth.

“The mystery of the origin of Phobos can be resolved, and its evolution since formation can be investigated by field geologists on site in contact with a larger team back on Earth. As a possible D-type (organics-rich with possible interior ice) asteroid, it offers science beyond what is readily available in the NEO population, and can shed light on the objects that delivered the initial inventory of water and organics to the surfaces of Earth and Mars,” the presentation continued.

“Returned samples would contain a record frozen very early in the formation of the solar system. The work would benefit significantly from a conjunction-class mission (540 days vs. 40 days at the target), since Phobos is a large and diverse body.

“Phobos has been a collector of ejected Martian surface material for billions of years. That material is a record of the history of early Mars that may not even be preserved on Mars itself due to weathering. Martian material should be readily recognizable by color for collection. These samples would be an important supplement to samples collected directly from the surface of Mars.

Challenges with communication from such a distant target are also cited, something which MOD will be gaining experience from via the NEEMO, Desert Rats and PLRP mission simulations.

Incidentally, the mission example used by the Flexible Path approach involves a fly-by of Venus on the return leg – and the closest humans have ever been to the Sun – along with possible flybys of several asteroids.

Regardless, such a mission becoming a reality remains many years away, with a huge amount of work and advances in human space flight required, even if the funding becomes available, likely resulting in such a mission being in the 2030s.

(As the shuttle fleet retire, NSF and L2 are providing full transition level coverage, available no where else on the internet, from Orion and SLS to ISS and COTS/CRS/CCDEV, to European and Russian vehicles.

(Click here to join L2: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/l2/ )

In a hundred years, facts sometimes become fiction in science...so it is with Mars

READ MORE:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20E13FF3D5813738DDDAE0A94D0405B818DF1D3

http://freddallas.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-york-times-reports-intelligent-life.html

What does a more than three billion year old sandstone formation in Western Australia have in common with Mars?

The Aussie stones contain the oldest living microbial record of life on Earth – and it might be the basis of fossil discovery on Mars. The early Archaean rocks are providing geologists with microfossil evidence that early life might have been utilizing sulpher – instead of oxygen – for their ecosystems.

“At last we have good solid evidence for life over 3.4 billion years ago. It confirms there were bacteria at this time, living without oxygen,” said co-researcher Professor Martin Brasier at Oxford University, UK. “Such bacteria are still common today. Sulphur bacteria are found in smelly ditches, soil, hot springs, hydrothermal vents – anywhere where there’s little free oxygen and they can live off organic matter,” he explained.

But providing morphological evidence for these sulphur-metabolizing bacteria hasn’t been as easy as just digging up some stones. The first detection came in 2007 at Strelley Pool, a now arid area which may have once been an estuary or shallow water region. Associated with micrometre-sized pyrite crystals, these microstructures show all the right ingredients for early life properties, such as hollow cell lumens and carbonaceous cell walls enriched in nitrogen. Spheroidal and ellipsoidal forms are good indicators of bacterial formations and tubular sheaths point to multiple cell growth. They also display pyrite content, but there’s no “fool’s gold” here in these light isotopes… it’s a metabolic by-products of the cells.

“Life likes lighter isotopes, so if you have a light signature in these minerals then it looks biological,” said lead author Dr David Wacey from the University of Western Australia. “There are ways to get the same signature without biology, but that generally requires very high temperatures. So when you put together the light isotope signature with the fact the pyrite is right next to the microfossils – just a couple of microns away – then it really does look like there was a whole sulphur ecosystem there,” he reported to BBC News.

So what does this discovery have to do with Mars? In its northern hemisphere is a region called Nili Fossae which photographically bears a strong resemblance to Australia’s Pilbara region – home to Strelley Pool. With a huge amount of clay minerals documented, Nili Fossae just might be the ideal place for US space agency’s Curiosity-Mars Science Laboratory rover mission to begin a search for early Martian life forms. But don’t get too excited just yet… The study on a remote planet is going to prove even more difficult than here on Earth.

“Some of the instruments we used can fill a whole room, but some of them can be miniaturised,” said Dr Wacey. “A rover could narrow down the targets but then you’d really have to bring samples back to Earth to study them in detail.”

http://www.universetoday.com/88437/microfossils-discovered-on-earth-could-aid-in-finding-ancient-life-on-mars/
Original Story Source: BBC News – Science and Environment and Nature Geoscience.

Microbial life on Mars: Could saltwater make it possible?

Globules of liquid saltwater were pictured on the leg of the Phoenix Mars Lander. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute

This project begins three years after beads of liquid brine were first photographed on one of the MarsPhoenix lander's legs.



Microbial life on Mars: Could saltwater make it possible?

A mounting body of evidence suggests the presence of liquid saltwater on the Red Planet.
How common are droplets of saltwater on Mars? Could microbial life survive and
reproduce in them?

A new million-dollar NASA project led by the University of Michigan aims to
answer those questions.

"On Earth, everywhere there's liquid water, there is microbial life," said Nilton Renno, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences who is the principal investigator. Researchers from NASA, the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Georgia and the Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid are also involved.

Scientists in the United States will create Mars conditions in lab chambers and study how and when brines form. These shoe-box-sized modules will have wispy carbon dioxide and water vapor atmospheres with 99 percent lower air pressure than the average pressure on Earth at sea level. Temperatures will range from -100 to -80 Fahrenheit and will be adjusted to mimic daily and seasonal cycles. Instruments will alert theresearchers to the formation of brine pockets, which could potentially be habitable by certain forms of microbial life.

Their colleagues overseas will seed similar chambers with salt-loving "extremophile" microorganisms from deep in Antarctic lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. The will observe whether these organisms survive, grow and reproduce in brines just below the surface of the soil. All known forms of life need liquid water to live. But microbes don't need much. A droplet or a thin film could suffice, researchers say.

"If we find microbes that can survive and replicate in brines at Mars conditions, we would have demonstrated that microbes could exist on Mars today," Renno said.
With his colleagues on the Mars Phoenix mission in 2008, Renno theorized that globules that moved and coalesced on the spacecraft's leg were liquid saltwater. Independent physical and thermodynamic evidence as well as follow-up experiments have confirmed that the drops were liquid and not frost or ice.

The Phoenix photos are believed to be the first pictures of liquid water outside the Earth.

The median temperature at the Phoenix landing site was -70 degrees Fahrenheit during the mission—too cold for liquid fresh water. But "perchlorate" salts found in the site's soils could lower water's freezing point dramatically, so that it could exist as liquid brine. The salts are also capable of absorbing water from the atmosphere in a process called deliquescence.

Provided by University of Michigan,which holds the copyright.
The content is provided for information purposes only.
"Microbial life on Mars: Could saltwater make it possible?." PHYSorg.com . 17 Aug 2011
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-microbial-life-mars-saltwater.html

NASA: Possible Seasonal Salty Water Flows on Mars

An image combining orbital imagery with 3-D modeling shows flows that appear in spring and summer on a slope inside Mars' Newton crater. Sequences of observations recording the seasonal changes at this site and a few others with similar flows might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today. Evidence for that possible interpretation is presented in a report in the Aug. 5, 2011, edition of Science. (NASA)


During warm months on Mars, salty water might run freely down the planet’s slopes.

Scientists are calling saltwater the most likely reason the Martian surface shows dark streaks during its warm seasons. “Finger-like features” appear on Martian terrain during the springtime, according to researchers.


“The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water,” said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in a statement.

McEwen is the lead author or a report in the journal Science that examines the seasonal flows on Mars. He thinks that since salt lowers the freezing temperature of water, it’s possible that the planet seems liquid flows — perhaps just under its surface.

No signs of water are present on the surface of the slopes, according to data gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

“The flows are not dark because of being wet,” McEwen said. “They are dark for some other reason.”

More from NASA:

A flow initiated by briny water could rearrange grains or change surface roughness in a way that darkens the appearance. How the features brighten again when temperatures drop is harder to explain.

These results are the closest scientists have come to finding evidence of liquid water on the planet’s surface today. Frozen water, however has been detected near the surface in many middle to high-latitude regions. Fresh-looking gullies suggest slope movements in geologically recent times, perhaps aided by water. Purported droplets of brine also appeared on struts of the Phoenix Mars Lander. If further study of the recurring dark flows supports evidence of brines, these could be the first known Martian locations with liquid water.

Space may be the final frontier, but Mars should be the next one.

At a spaceflight propulsion conference held by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics on Tuesday, Elon Musk -- the billionaire founder of PayPal and the man behind leading private spaceflight company SpaceX -- spoke about just how to get humanity there.

"Are we on the path to becoming a multi-planet species or not?" Musk asked the crowd at the event. "If we're not, it's really not that exciting after all."

The challenge to getting to Mars is transporting significant tons of cargo and people, Musk noted, a task that will require what he described as a rapidly and fully reusable rocket.

"There's a reason no one has invented a fully reusable rocket before," Musk explained. "It's super-damn hard."

Still, the inventor has a plan for interplanetary travel, and a name for it: Falcon.

Musk described several of the recent advances made by his company's Falcon 9 rockets, which were tested successfully for the first time June 4, 2010. The rocket is designed to generate 3.8 million pounds (1,700 metric tons) of thrust -- making it easily capable of carrying satellites, cargo, and even humans to other planets, he said.

"It's got potential as a generalized science delivery platform for other planets in the solar system," Musk noted.

While he believes there will be a single vehicle for transporting humans to the Red Planet and back -- at least at first -- a Mars base could dramatically change the game.

"As soon as you've got a base on Mars, you've got a 'forcing function' for improving the transportation capability," he noted.

The company did not explain prior to the 4 p.m. EST speech what Musk would discuss, other than referencing the title of his brief speech: "Getting to Mars." But the SpaceX founder has often publicly stated his desire to have humans on Mars within 20 years.

According to a story at Space.com, NASA has been tentatively discussing work with the company and its Dragon capsule on an exploratory mission to Mars, a so-called "Red Dragon" mission.

In that mission, NASA's science hardware would fly to the Red Planet aboard SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which the company is developing to ferry cargo and astronauts to and from the International Space Station, Space.com reported.

The Dragon capsule is designed to work in concert with the company's multistage Falcon 9 rocket, either on short range resupply trips to the International Space Station or on longer range missions to other planets.

This so-called "Red Dragon" mission, which could be ready to launch by 2018, would carry a cost of about $400 million or less. And the Dragon capsule clearly fits Musk's description of "rapidly and fully reusable."

At the AIAA speech, Musk also teased a new engine development -- needed to bring cargo and people to Mars, he noted -- which he promised to unveil later this year.



Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/08/01/spacex-founder-on-how-to-get-to-mars/#ixzz1TsvVzHcs

MISSION TO MARS: UNMANNED CRAFT TO LAND IN MARS CRATER IN 2012

Nasa has also announced details of plans to determine if Mars has or ever had the ingredients for life. A robotic science laboratory, being prepared for a November 25 launch, will land in August 2012 near a mountain in a crater on the planet most like Earth in the solar system.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2018477/Nasa-ordered-astronauts-asteroid-15-years.html#ixzz1T8Iuhs6r

The announcement came after the final curtain fell on Nasa's 30-year-old space shuttle programme with Thursday's landing of Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center.

A detailed blueprint of Nasa's follow-on space exploration strategy is still pending and many Americans fear the demise of the shuttle program means the U.S. is relinquishing its leadership in space. President Barack Obama has said the objective is to build new spaceships that can travel beyond the shuttle's near-Earth orbit and eventually send astronauts to asteroids, Mars and other destinations in deep space.

At a Cape Canaveral briefing on Wednesday, Nasa officials will discuss preparations for the agency's upcoming Juno mission to Jupiter.

The unmanned spacecraft, set for launch in August, is expected to reach Jupiter's orbit in July 2016 and should further understanding of the solar system's beginnings by revealing the origin and evolution of its largest planet.

Among the most sophisticated probes in the offing, the plutonium-powered roving Mars Science Lab, nicknamed Curiosity, is being prepared for launch in November.

Twice as long and five times heavier than previous Mars rovers, Curiosity packs ten science instruments, including two for on-site chemical analysis of pulverized rock.

With it, scientists hope to learn if Mars has or ever had the organics necessary for life - at least life as it appears on Earth.

Scientists spent five years mulling 60 possible landing sites before narrowing the list to four: Eberwalde Crater, Mawrth Vallis, Holden Crater and - the winner - Gale Crater, which sports a stunning three mile-high mountain of rocks rising from the crater floor. That's about twice the height of the stack of rocks exposed in the Grand Canyon.

Analysis from Mars-orbiting spacecraft shows the base of Gale Crater's mountain includes both clays and sulphate salts, the only site among the four finalists with both types of materials available.

Scientists do not know how the mountain formed, but it may be the eroded remnant of sediment that once completely filled the crater.

Though Curiosity's mission is scheduled to last two years, scientists hope the rover will live past its warranty.

One of a pair of Mars rovers that arrived for concurrent three-month surveys in January 2004 is still working. Its twin succumbed to the harsh Martian environment only last year.

They returned evidence that Mars was once far wetter and warmer than the dry, cold desert that exists today.

Scientists who study the Red Planet say they whole-heartedly approve of the choice of Gale Crater as the landing site for NASA's next Mars rover.

NASA's next Mars rover will land at the foot of a layered mountain inside the planet’s Gale Crater.
CREDIT: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory


The space agency announced the decision to go with Gale today (July 22), after a five-year process that originally considered about 60 possible sites. NASA narrowed the list down to four choices in 2008, then revealed last month that it was deciding between two finalists: Gale and another crater called Eberswalde.

Gale is 96 miles (154 kilometers) wide, and a 3-mile-high (5-km) mountain rises from its center. The crater also harbors clays and sulfate salts, signs that liquid water flowed in the area long ago.


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The car-size Curiosity rover— the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission — will cruise around Gale beginning in August 2012. Its main mission is to assess whether the crater is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life. [Mars Explored: Landers and Rovers Since 1971 (Infographic)]

Via email, SPACE.com asked several scientists with extensive experience studying Mars, and/or the prospect of Martian life, what they thought about NASA's choice. By and large, they were excited about Gale and the potential of Curiosity's mission:

Maria Zuber (geophysicist at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.): To be honest, I am thrilled with the decision to land in Gale Crater.

Geologically, the site is complex. But given the mission objectives, that is a good thing, as it contains much of what one would like to observe and measure to assess habitability and biological potential, and how these may have changed over time.

The Curiosity payload and the ruggedness of the rover are well suited to address the science objectives at this site.

Mark Lemmon (planetary and atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station): I love the Gale site. It is exciting for science and for exploration. The rover will be able to explore sedimentary rock layers that have been altered by water. It will do this while moving through picturesque canyons and with a view of a 5-km tall mound. [Gale Crater FAQ: Mars Landing Spot for Next Rover Explained]

With such a singular mound of sedimentary rocks, the view will combine aspects of seeing Mt. Rainier and the Grand Canyon. Along the way, the rover will see clays from a wetter Mars and could drive to where those clays meet the sulfates deposited during the drying out of the area.

As an atmospheric scientist, I am also looking forward to watching the seasons at the site. It was the site best positioned for seeing water-ice clouds that form every northern summer, when Mars is farthest from the sun.

All of the finalist sites were good, but Gale seemed to be the one that had the biggest story about Mars' history to tell.

Peter Smith (planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson): Gale Crater is an excellent site that allows exploration in the truest sense.

The challenges and rewards of driving a nuclear-powered rover up a 5-km mountain over several years will test the abilities of both the science and engineering team. I am sure that they are up to the task and look forward to the results.

Chris Carr (engineer and research scientist at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.): Any of the final four options (Gale Crater, Eberswalde Crater, Holden Crater or Mawrth Vallis) originally considered by NASA would have been great (that is why those sites made it to the top four).

One challenge for Gale Crater is the need to traverse a significant distance to reach the central mound of the crater, where the rover could study the stratigraphic layers of (presumed) clays and sulfates.

These deposits are very interesting, because on Earth such deposits can preserve organic materials over geologic timescales. For example, some lipids can be preserved for up to billions of years.

Chris McKay (astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.): I am happy with the decision to go with Gale Crater.

SPACE.com: What are the most exciting or interesting aspects of Gale?

McKay: The prospects of investigating clays and sedimentary layers that span most of, if not all of, Mars history in the central mount in Gale Crater.

Zuber: The center of Gale Crater features a 5-km-high mountain that contains layers that grade in composition from bottom to top. The rocks preserve the record of surface chemistry that appears to have been influenced greatly by water. [Video: Fly Over Gale Crater on Mars]

The evidence for water ranges from the deposition of the mountain itself to the chemistry of the rocks to channels that cut the terrain, and argues for an extended and changing aqueous history.

Smith: The wealth of water-related features and altered minerals opens a window onto the past history of Mars that has never before been explored. My hope is that there remains ample evidence showing that organic materials were common in ancient Mars.

Slowly working our way up through the layered deposits is sedimentary geology done in a classical fashion. Can we find the transition from an early wet Mars to the modern dry state that we see today? The question then is what happened to the water — Gale Crater may hold the answer.

Carr: The thick stratigraphic layers of the Gale Crater central mound. If Curiosity is able to traverse to and up through these layers, we will be taking a walk through time that covers a large swath of Martian history, a period when Mars may have been more habitable than it is today.

SPACE.com: Do you have high hopes for Curiosity's mission? What do you think it will find?

McKay: I do indeed have high hopes for Curiosity's mission. I think we will be able to detect organics on the surface of Mars.

My optimism on this is the result of the combined Phoenix and Viking results. Taken together, they imply that there are organics in the soils of Mars (at the few ppm [parts per million] level) but that the presence of perchlorate prevented their detection by the Viking instruments.

We believe that the instruments on Curiosity will be able to detect the few ppm organics even with the perchlorates present. So I expect that we'll have an exciting time trying to determine if there is any evidence for biological activity in the organics we find. The alternative is that the organics might be simply due to meteorite infall. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]

Zuber: Whenever we have looked in a new place at higher resolution or with new sensors, the discoveries have been remarkable, and I expect Curiosity to continue in the great tradition of Mars robotic explorers.

As far as what the rover will find, I have a wish rather than a prediction. I am hoping that as Curiosity moves up the stratigraphic section in the central mound and maps the evolving chemistry, that the measurements will inform our understanding of the role of the atmosphere in the evolving surface environment.

The question of how and over what period Mars lost much of its atmosphere, and how that relates to climate change, is one of the most compelling and puzzling questions in Mars science. [Photos: Curiosity Rover, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory]

Lemmon: If the rover lands safely, the investigation of the clays and sulfates at the base of the mound will put MSL onto the list of missions that revolutionize what we know about Mars.

Carr: I definitely have high hopes. This is an extremely capable rover with a tremendous set of instruments.

In particular, I am personally excited about the role the ChemCam instrument will play in providing rapid context at a distance, the in-depth sample analysis capability of the SAM instrument and the radiation data that will be collected by DAN, with its implications for modern habitability of Mars, including for future human visitors.

I make no predictions but hope we will find unambiguous evidence of organics among the layers in Gale Crater.

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Possibility for life on Mars found by scientists on Earth

The Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, undergoes mobility testing inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility to prepare it for its fall 2011 launch

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/05/MN3I1K5KK3.DTL#ixzz1RKTcGViC

Possibility for life on Mars found by scientists
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

All it took was a hungry scientist to stop for lunch in the Mojave Desert, and suddenly there was a new prospect for seeking signs of life on Mars.

Space researcher Christopher P. McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in the Santa Clara County city of Mountain View was hiking with friends a few years ago, when they stopped to picnic at a rocky desert spot called Little Red Hill near Barstow a few years ago.

McKay cracked open one of the rocks littering the ground all around him, and found clear white inside and a greenish tinge beneath.

At her lab in Mountain View, Janice L. Bishop, a geochemist at the SETI Institute, analyzed the rock to find that the white inside was basically a carbonate mineral called dolomite, with a mix of other carbonates. The carbonates had originally formed in water.

And the greenish tinge underneath the rock was a varied group of living microbe species called Chroococcidiopsis, known as cyanobacteria - blue-green algae.

Bishop analyzed more rocks from the Mojave and found they all held the same mix. The red coating was a form of iron oxide called hematite.

Bishop, McKay and their colleagues published a report in the July 1 issue of the International Journal of Astrobiology.

"We know that the red coating - like all the red rocks on Mars - is iron oxide that acts like a protective coat around the carbonates," McKay said in an interview Tuesday, describing the rock he found. "In the desert, the microbes underneath them need only a little sunlight coming in through cracks in the rocks to live by photosynthesis - it could have been the same on Mars."

Carbonates form in water, but carbonates on Mars have been detected only in several small areas. For example, instruments aboard the Mars rover Spirit, now stuck forever in the sand of Gusev crater, detected carbonates in a rock outcrop named "Pot of Gold" right after it first landed on the planet more than seven years ago. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, aloft above the planet, has also detected carbonates in the rocks of a crater.

Knowing that, Bishop and McKay reason that, just as life lives beneath the red-tinged carbonate rocks in the Mojave, the red rocks on Mars' surface could well hide the evidence of fossil life underneath them.

"Iron oxides coating the rocks are everywhere on Mars," Bishop said. "We've found carbonates that formed in water inside the same desert varnish in the rocks from the Mojave. So they should be broadly distributed on Mars, too."

A spacecraft called the Mars Science Laboratory, a much larger and more powerful rover than either Spirit or its twin, Opportunity, is to be launched in the fall and will start exploring the planet next summer.

"That rover will be able to drill into the rocks when it starts exploring," McKay said.

The Mojave dessert was once a shallow sea some 250 million years ago, and the desert's carbonate rocks formed there. Today's living microbes sheltered beneath the rocks resulted from recent rains.

"We need to be looking for the same thing everywhere on Mars," McKay said. "Only landers - not orbiters - will be able to find them."


E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/06/MN3I1K5KK3.DTL

Could Martian Life Have Seeded the Earth?

The astronauts who blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard the final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour this morning weren't alone—thousands of travelers are accompanying them. These passengers are a collection of microorganisms, and this morning's launch was the beginning of a trip that could show the plausibility of an even more amazing journey: Microbes traveling from Mars to Earth billions of years ago to seed our planet with life.

For the collection of five hardy species—including the radiation-resistant "water bear" and Halomonadaceae bacteria, which can survive in high-salt environments—traveling to the International Space Station and back aboard Endeavour is the first leg of a long journey. Bruce Betts, a project director at the Planetary Society, is one of the scientists planning to send a similar set of organisms, plus a few additional species, all the way to a Martian moon as part of the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment. The society has reserved a spot on the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission ("grunt" means soil in Russian), which is set to take off for Mars' moon Phobos this November. By practicing on Endeavour, the scientists will ensure that things run as smoothly as possible as the microorganisms make their way to Mars.

This trip is intended as a test of the transpermia hypothesis: that Mars may have held life billions of years ago, and that organisms could have survived the trip to Earth and seeded this planet with life. Those organisms may have invaded the Earth by traveling inside rocks that were blasted off the Martian surface by meteorites. "Whether you can populate planets from other planets is one of the more profound questions," Betts says. "It's intriguing, and it's worth understanding whether the theory is really plausible."

Wayne Nicholson, a microbiologist at the University of Florida, says that evidence so far suggests it's possible. Mars and Earth have exchanged millions of tons rocks, and that exchange has mostly been from Mars to Earth. Earthly microbes can live inside rock, and microbes launched into space (both by accident and for research purposes) have lived to tell the tale—they survive particularly well when sheltered within soil or rock. Laboratory tests show microbes can even survive the shock of crash-landing on a planet after traveling through space.

But, Nicholson says, no experiment has ever gone this far: "There has never been an experiment where organisms have been exposed to the deep space environment, between planets, for such a long period of time." While previous studies have launched microbes into space, sometimes inadvertently, he says that most of those samples never left low-Earth orbit. By remaining within the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic fields, those organisms were partially shielded from the damaging effects of cosmic radiation. The few missions that transported microbes beyond Earth orbit did so for only a few days at a time—a far cry from the years required for interplanetary travel.

The microorganisms' trip to Phobos and back will be a bit more complicated than the shuttle flight. Samples of each organism will enjoy the flight separately from inside sealed tubes. The tubes will be wrapped in a titanium shell that's about the size of a hockey puck, with four strong seals to prevent any contamination of Mars or its moons with Earthly life.

The microbes will ride inside the Russian spacecraft in a dormant form—the excruciating conditions of interplanetary space causes the microorganisms to shut down most of their functions, as during hibernation. And although they won't be directly exposed to the space vacuum, they will suffer high levels of radiation exposure and temperature extremes on their three-year journey. According to the Planetary Society, these conditions will simulate the conditions the microorganisms would encounter if they were traveling toward Earth inside a rock that came from Mars.

The Phobos-Grunt mission's main goal is to collect soil and rock samples. Once that's done, it will blast its sample container (including the microorganisms and the rock samples) to a designated landing spot in Kazakhstan. Since the experiment will come hurtling back to Earth at 4000 g's, the titanium container is built to be nearly indestructible.

If the microbes survive their trip to Mars and back, it won't mean for sure that Earthly organisms are descended from Martians—but it does leave that possibility open. "However it turns out, it is going to be interesting," Nicholson says.



Read more: - Space Shuttle Endeavour Final Flight - Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/could-martian-life-have-seeded-the-earth

Life on Mars has been the subject of much debate and speculation that has gripped our minds since we gazed upon the stars.

Many years ago, the discovery of ice in the red planet offered some clues as to whether it once had water and was able to support life sometime in the distant past.

NASA scientists recently discovered an underground dry ice lake containing more carbon dioxide than originally thought. The trapped carbon dioxide is thought to have come from the planet’s atmosphere earlier in its history when it was conducive for life on Mars to exist.

“It really is a buried treasure,” said Jeffrey Plaut, a scientist of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a report appearing in the journal Science. “We found something underground that no one else realized was there.”

The discovery was made possible through ground-penetrating radar of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter who is searching for clues of life on Mars.

Dry ice on Mars is not a new discovery, but the recent finding suggests that what is locked down there is about 30 times more than originally thought.

Scientists have often wondered where atmospheric gases capable of supporting life on Mars went and resulted to the present thin atmosphere of the planet. They speculate that some gases became trapped in dry ice as part of a seasonal cycle.

Still, even the enormous amounts of dry ice discovered will not be able recreate an atmosphere thick enough to support life on Mars, the scientists said.

The polar ice caps as well as existing canyons, gullies and river channels who have carved the surface of the planet are the other possible signs of past life on Mars.

A Tale Of Two Deserts on Earth that are Mars like

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A Tale Of Two Deserts
http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/A_Tale_Of_Two_Deserts_999.html
University Valley, one of Antarctica's Upper Dry Valleys, where liquid water is a scarce commodity because the ground remains frozen year-round. Credit: M. Marinova.
by Henry Bortman
for Astrobiology Magazine
Moffett Field CA (SPX) Apr 19, 2011

Because the surface of Mars today is bone-dry and frozen all year round, it's difficult to find any place on Earth that is truly Mars-like. But two locations, Antarctica's Upper Dry Valleys and the hyper-arid core of Chile's Atacama Desert, come close. They have become magnets for scientists who want to understand the limits of life on Earth and the prospects for life on Mars.
Jocelyne DiRuggiero, an associate professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, studies samples from both locations. She's interested in the similarities and the differences between the microbial communities that live in these two extreme desert regions. In both places, very little liquid water is present.

In the core of the Atacama, years can go by between one rainfall and the next, but it is warm, so when there is precipitation, a significant amount of liquid water is available for a very short time.

In University Valley, one of Antarctica's Upper Dry Valleys, the availability of liquid water is limited in a different way. University Valley receives more regular precipitation than the Atacama, but it's so cold there that any precipitation falls in the form of snow and remains frozen.

"What we do in those environments is try to understand who is there, what those organisms might be doing, how they are distributed," and whether the organisms are "really active metabolically," or if instead they're "just sitting there, because they've been brought by the wind."

DiRuggiero's primary tool is DNA sequencing. Working with soil samples that weigh one- to two-tenths of a gram each (about a teaspoonful), she extracts the DNA from any microbes present in each sample. She then sends the DNA off to a lab for sequencing.

Sample preparation is a difficult process because there aren't many microbes in her samples. Each gram of soil contains perhaps one hundred to one thousand, an extremely low number. The same size sample of ordinary soil typically contains ten million to a billion organisms.

Because the microbial populations she's working with are so small, contamination is a serious problem. She has to be careful not to let skin cells or hair fall into her samples. Sneezing or coughing on them could pollute them.

So DiRuggiero does her work under a special hood that prevents contact with outside air. And even then she has problems, because some of the silica filters she uses to extract DNA from her samples arrive from the manufacturer with microbial cells clinging to them.

Although she has had more time to work with samples from the Atacama, DiRuggiero says the University Valley samples are particularly interesting. Because University Valley is both near the South Pole and more than a mile above sea level, the ground there stays frozen even in summer. There are few places in the world where this is true. "It's about 40 degrees Celsius colder than the Atacama soil," she says. That's about 70 degrees Fahrenheit colder.

That temperature difference results in a significant difference in habitability. There are more microbes in University Valley soil than in Atacama soil.

"Right now the only parameter ... we have measured that differentiates the populations, Antarctica and the Atacama, is the temperature," DiRuggiero says. In both locations, "the soils are very dry, the soils are very low in organics, they contain a fair amount of salt. The big difference is the temperature."

"We don't really know what it means yet."

It may seem odd that microbes are happier in sub-freezing conditions than in a warm desert. "This is counter to human experience but makes sense for microbes," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, wrote in an email.

"Cold allows them to sleep, which is a good survival mechanism," he explained, adding that "this result bodes well for life in the cold deserts of Mars." McKay heads the NASA-funded IceBite team, which is testing a prototype coring drill for possible use on a future Mars mission. The IceBite team obtained the University Valley samples that DiRuggiero studies.

So far DiRuggiero has been working with University Valley samples collected during the IceBite team's first season in the field, in 2009. She's looking forward to getting her hands on more-extensive samples collected at the end of 2010, samples that are still making their way back from Antarctica.

Beneath the dry soil layer in University Valley is "what we call ice-cemented ground, which is basically frozen mud. And that mud has been frozen for thousands and thousands of years," says DiRuggiero.

"So the question is, Is there any water available for the micro-organisms, and do we see a difference in the microbial community between the soil above and this ice-cemented ground right underneath?"

There is some evidence, based on climate data collected last year by the IceBite team, that at the interface between the dry soil and the frozen mud, "there might be some melting in the summer," says DiRuggiero. "There might be water available at least part of the time" and microbes might be "actively growing and metabolizing at least during a small portion of the year."

"Melting," in this case, doesn't mean the soil gets soggy or muddy, or that the temperature gets above freezing. Rather, it means that thin layers of liquid water can form between the sand grains that make up the soil and the ice below it. But that's plenty of water for microbes. They're small. They don't need a lot of water.

"At temperatures above -20 degrees C (-4 degrees F) there is a layer of unfrozen water between the sand grains and the ice. These layers can support microbial life at least [down] to -15 degrees C (5 degrees F)," McKay explained.

"On Mars today the temperatures of the ground ice are much too cold for this effect to be useful," he wrote. But Mars wobbles. At present Mars is tilted on its axis at about the same angle as Earth's. Five million years ago, however, Mars leaned over at an angle of about 45 degrees , and for nearly half of each martian year (equivalent to about one Earth year), the polar regions received constant sunlight. Back then "the ground ice at the polar regions," like the site where NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed in 2008, "would have been much warmer. We think it would have been in the range of -15 degrees C to -20 degrees C. So liquid water layers" in the past were "a possibility."

The question then is this: If life ever took hold on Mars, back when the planet was warmer and wetter, did a few hardy microbes evolve a survival strategy that let them go into a deep sleep, and then every 10 or 20 million years, when the ground warmed up to -20 degrees C or so, wake up and put on a little growth spurt?

The answer will have to wait until a follow-up mission to the martian polar regions can dig deeper than Phoenix did. It is just such deep polar drilling that McKay's IceBite project is working to make possible.

In the meantime, DiRuggiero will have no problem staying busy. There is still much left to learn about the dry limit of life, in both Antarctica and the Atacama.

Other Blogs... Other Spaceports. SAM heading for MARS.

Dr. Paul Mahaffy is the Principle Investigator for the SAM analysis suite on Mars Science Laboratory Rover (Curiosity). An important goal of upcoming missions to Mars is to understand if life could have developed there. The vehicle should land in 2012.

MORE AT SPACEPORTS

The task of the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite of instruments and the other Curiosity investigations is to move us steadily toward that goal with an assessment of the habitability of our neighboring planet through a series of chemical and geological measurements. SAM is designed to search for organic compounds and inorganic volatiles and measure isotope ratios.

http://spaceports.blogspot.com/2011/01/mars-rover-will-check-for-ingredients.html



Other instruments on Curiosity will provide elemental analysis and identify minerals. Dr. Mahaffy discusses how SAM will analyze both atmospheric samples and gases evolved from powdered rocks that may have formed billions of years ago with Curiosity providing access to interesting sites scouted by orbiting cameras and spectrometers.

Announcing that there are Space Aliens 'wouldn't faze modern world'

Astronomers are now able to detect planets orbiting stars other than the Sun where life may exist, and living generations could see the signatures of extra-terrestrial life being detected. Should it turn out that we are not alone in the Universe, it will fundamentally affect how humanity understands itself—and we need to be prepared for the consequences. A Discussion Meeting held at the Royal Society in London, 6–9 Carlton House Terrace, on 25–26 January 2010, addressed not only the scientific but also the societal agenda, with presentations covering a large diversity of topics.

Aliens 'wouldn't faze modern world'
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/current/
The comments are part of an extraterrestrial-themed edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A published today. In it, scientists examine all aspects of the search for extraterrestrial life, from astronomy and biology to the political and religious fallout that would result from alien contact.

Proof that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is unlikely to upset modern Earthlings: times have changed dramatically since 1961 when the US Congress was warned that evidence of extra-terrestrials would lead to widespread panic, argued psychologist Dr Albert Harrison.
First contact with ET, or the discovery of ancient alien relics on Earth or Mars, would probably be met with delight or indifference today, he believes.

Dr Harrison, from the University of California at Davis, US, wrote in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: "The discovery of ETI (extra-terrestrial intelligence) may be far less startling for generations that have been brought up with word processors, electronic calculators, avatars and cell phones as compared with earlier generations used to typewriters, slide rules, pay phones and rag dolls."

People had been getting used to the idea of ET since the Seti (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project first began listening out for alien radio signals 50 years ago, said Dr Harrison.

Today, surveys suggest that half the population of the US and Europe believe extra-terrestrials exist, and a "substantial proportion" were convinced alien spacecraft had already visited the Earth.

As long ago as the 1840s a popular New York newspaper reported on the discovery of "batmen" on the Moon. Later it was widely accepted that astronomers had found evidence of canals built by a dying civilisation on Mars.

In the 1960s scientists suspected that quasars and pulsars, galaxies and stars that emit powerful bursts of energy, might be intelligently controlled, said Dr Harrison. And in 1996 the American space agency Nasa announced it had found fossil evidence of life on Mars, in the form of a meteorite containing alien bugs.

"Society has been unfazed by batmen on the Moon, the canals of Mars, discoveries of quasars and pulsars, claims that a fossil arrived from Mars, and bogus announcements of Seti detections," Dr Harrison wrote.

In North America and Europe at least, neither the discovery of an alien specimen nor the detection of a "dial tone at a distance" were likely to lead to "widespread psychological disintegration and collapse".