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.