This week NASA released an ultra-high-resolution view of the frigid Martian landscape captured by the only rover currently operating on the red planet. “The view provides … a spectacularly detailed view of the largest impact crater that we’ve driven to yet,” said planetary scientist Jim Bell of Arizona State University in a press release July 5. The solar-powered, golf-cart-sized rover, called Opportunity, wrapped up exploration of the half-mile-wide Victoria Crater in August 2008. It then rolled for the next three years to reach the 14-mile-wide Endeavour Crater. But the plucky robot must hunker down during Martian winters that last six Earth months, as Opportunity needs to have enough power to warm its fragile electronics. So from Dec. 21, 2011 through May 8, 2012, NASA instructed the robot to stay put and take 817 images. The space agency stitched those photos together to craft a near-wraparound image of Opportunity’s overwintering spot, a rocky outcrop near the 4-billion-year-old Endeavour Crater that scientists named “Greeley Haven.” NASA’s next car-sized rover called Curiosity arrives at Mars Aug. 5, but it won’t have to overwinter like Opportunity. Instead of relying on feeble sunlight, it will use a thermoelectric nuclear battery to provide it with decades’ worth of power. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State University [high-resolution version]

NASA's Curiosity rover, carried by the Mars Science Laboratory

NASA Curiosity rover started on a 354 million mile trip to Mars last November around my birthday. The rover is set to land on the surface of Mars on August 6 which is one day after my son Jordan's birthday this year... it's arrival on Mars gets closer...


NASA's Curiosity rover, carried by the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft, will land near the Martian equator at approximately 10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5, (1:31 a.m. EDT on Aug. 6).


When I was teaching , I imagined teaching two semesters of what was then called the Integration of Physics and Chemistry (IPC) to my students with a theme of Martian Exploration. Started a blog to capture information for that project: http://themissionismars.blogspot.com/ . You are reading that blog here.


Yes, I was hoping that one of the missions might find life on the Red Planet. That child hood dream is a bit faded now: the more we have learned with our actual Martian Exploration, the less likely it seems that we will find any signs of life on Mars in my waning life time.


We still might find a microbial life form in some relatively warm wet spot on Mars... or beneath the surface, but I have come to believe that we humans will become the Martians, as in Ray Bradbury's (http://www.raybradbury.com/about.html) THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. We, humans will move out across the Solar System as in Ben Bova's (http://www.benbova.net/) Grand Tour books; and colonize and explot the Moon with Robert A. Heinlein's (http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/index.htm) private enterprise model... and we will reach and transform Mars itself as in Kim Stanley Robinson's MARS TRILOGY (http://kimstanleyrobinson.info/w/index.php5?title=Mars_trilogy).



But I getting ahead of the news... http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

NASA has re-targeted the Rover from a large landing ellipse of 20 km x 25 km. That larger landing ellipse certainly gave a lot of room for error, but NASA has re-thought that landing zone.

NASA is now targeting a significantly smaller landing ellipse that will put the rover closer to the base of Mount Sharp on the Martian surface. The new landing ellipse on the surface is significantly smaller at 7 km x 20 km. NASA feels hitting the smaller landing area will be possible thanks to the high-precision landing system that the rover is using.

The rover has thrusters that will guide the high-velocity phase of entry into the atmosphere of Mars. This is the first rover to use this technology, which was unavailable on previous missions to Mars. The goal of the smaller landing ellipse is to reduce the time it takes for the rover to roll over to its primary science location. The smaller landing zone, and less distance the rover needs to travel also reduces the chance of any incidents during travel time. NASA scientists are hoping Curiosity will find layered rock deposits at the site to provide new insight into past environmental conditions on the surface of Mars.

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.