Do the Mars Rovers See Martian Leprechauns?

June 22, 2009

What I love about NASA conspiracy theorists -- you know those folks who think we never went to the moon and the Air Force is  hiding alien bodies -- is that they want to have their cake and eat it too.

At a recent convention called, you guessed it, Conspiracy Con 2009, self-styled Mars sleuth, Andrew Basiago, accused NASA of hiding evidence of Martian life in photos taken from the rover Spirit.

But I will bet money that when NASA eventually releases images showing manmade artifacts at the Apollo landing sites, to be photographed from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO, which will enter lunar orbit tomorrow) conspiracy flakes will accuse NASA of faking the PR pictures.

Future Forecast for Solar System: Worlds in Collision?

June 13, 2009

Astronomy’s equivalent of the “Great Pumpkin” from the Peanuts comic strip is popping up again on Internet traffic. For the sixth year in a row, an Internet message gone viral predicts that the planet Mars will look as "big as the full moon" later this year. 

Nope, not happening. But in our capricious universe, never say never.

A new computer simulation of the dynamical evolution of the solar system over the next 5 billion years suggests that our distant descendents could witness such a sky spectacle, just before the world is destroyed in a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

Are We Ready to Live on Other Planets?

June 08, 2009

The  International Space Station has a beefed up crew that has gone from three to six astronauts, now that the construction of the $100 billion space laboratory is nearly complete. We are told that the station crew will be able to spend more time doing medical and biological experiments in the station's microgravity environment to prepare humans for journeys to the moon and Mars.

We are “learning to live in space” is the shorthand justification for why we have a space station. But are the right questions behind the ISS experiments being asked? Exactly how salient is the research on the ISS when applied to human interplanetary travel?

A Mundane Spacecraft Name Game

May 29, 2009

I hope there are no martian cats at the landing site where the multi-billion dollar Mars Science Lab (MSL) will touchdown in 2011.

Why? Because the lander has been named Curiosity, in a NASA contest where 9,000 students across the country submitted essays for their favorite name.

And, we all know what curiosity did to the cat.

Potentially Habitable Worlds Are Wet & Wild

March 28, 2009

I recently had fun making a baking soda powered tabletop volcano to the delight of my grandson Leo, who just loves watching the thing explode. You know, that popular middle school science fair project where vinegar (acetic acid) neutralizes baking soda and causes it to give off carbon dioxide, creating pressure that blows the liquid up a toy volcano cone.

But on other planets there may really be volcanoes gushing out water rather than molten rock. And, mud volcanoes that belch out a slurry of organic-rich material, if not subterranean microbes.

The possible discovery of wet slushy volcanoes on Titan and Mars, and damp soils, is ratcheting up the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life. A number of papers were presented last week at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

Cryovolcano

In the frigid outer solar system, where daytime temperatures are at -300 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, a different type of geology may be taking place – cryovolcanos. These mountains are suspected of spewing out a Slurpee of ice, propane, butane and other liquid hydrocarbons.

The best candidate is an area known as Hotei Arcus, thought not everyone agrees it is really a volcano. Photos on different flybys taken by the NASA/ESA Cassini orbiter have been interpreted as cryo-lava outflows. 

The lobe-like fingers, each hundreds of feet high, have a shape and thickness consistent with highly viscous lava on Earth. Like an advancing flow of lava, the lobes also appear to cut off several small streams apparently carved by liquid methane.

You need a subterranean heat source close to liquid reservoirs to spew out this stuff. It’s sort of nature’s recreation of the famous 1952 Miller-Urey experiment that mixed pre-biotic compounds, such as water, methane and ammonia (an ideal antifreeze for Titan) to make amino acids – the building block of life.

Mud Volcanoes

Closer to home, Mars orbiting spacecraft have identified dozens of mounds in the northern plains that bear a striking resemblance to mud volcanoes on Earth. High-resolution images reveal small knobs or patches. They frequently have one or more craters and an irregular shape.

As on Earth, a mud volcano would form when pressurized gas and water from as much as several miles down, blows out the surface like a popped Champaign cork. This shoots out a gooey mess of water, mud, rocks, as well as methane.

 Mud volcanoes would accomplish what a martian drilling rig would have a tough time doing, transporting rocks from several miles beneath the martian surface, and placing them within reach of sample-return rovers.

Microbial life could be flourishing deep below the martian surface, perhaps driven there as surface conditions became hostile over geologic time. It may be warm enough miles below the surface for water to remain a liquid. The volcanoes, which may be as young as 10 million years, offered an elevator for microbes to reach the surface – in a martian twist on the closing chapter of Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Center of The Earth.

 

Briny Droplets

A highly publicized surprise from NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander was the discovery of perchlorates in the planet’s arctic region. Perchlorate is the stuff used to make rocket fuel and explode fireworks. On Mars these salts could keep water in a liquid state at temperatures of -160 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pockets of brine might form when the perchlorate mixes with the water ice that Phoenix found near the north pole. In fact there has been a lively debate whether Phoenix photographed briny liquid water droplets on the lander legs, which would have been kicked up by its landing thrusters. Some scientists think they move like a liquid in successive exposures. Others say it’s just frost.

The perchlorates may explain why the mid 1970s Viking biology experiments did not find any organic compounds in the soil. The soil was heated in the Viking biology experiments. Heated perchlorates release their oxygen and burn up and organic material! So maybe the release of carbon dioxide seen in the Viking experiments was actually from the disintegration of trace organic material.

These findings show that the road to indentifying extraterrestrial life is long and arduous, with potential dead ends and misinterpretations. But the payoff of a positive detection is so staggering, the long haul and lively debate among scientists is well worth it.

 

Mars Volcanoes an Oasis for Life?

March 06, 2009

In the 1990 film, Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger explores a huge mountain on Mars that contains alien machinery for making oxygen.

Mars has a real mountain that may be more wondrous in real life. Its aliens would be microbes living in the martian equivalent of the Garden of Eden.

The titanic 15- mile high shield volcano Olympus Mons  might be soggy and warm, making it virtual sauna for a martian organisms.

Image analysis and computer modeling reported in a science paper published this week in the journal Geology suggests that ancient lava once flowed unevenly across a wet clay-like surface. This gives Olympus Mons a lopsided appearance with a gently sloping northwest flank and a much steeper southeastern wall.

This volcano behemoth may still be cooking. The last outflow is estimated to have happened as little as 20 million years ago.

The 340 mile wide base of the volcano, big enough to cover the northeastern United States, could contain a lot of warm water, making it a sauna for microbial life, say researchers.

Perhaps any martian microbes would be cousins to some of the earliest forms of life that appeared on the young volcanic Earth, the thermophiles, who are even found today in various geothermally heated regions of the Earth such as hot springs like those in Yellowstone National Park, and at ocean floor hydrothermal vents. The organisms thrive on heat and don’t need sunlight.

The problem is how do you explore the mammoth mountain in search for life?

Back in 2007 NASA first reported seeing football field sized cave entrances on the slope of a smaller volcano, Arsea Mons.  The caves are so big you could drop a football stadium into the entrance. The holes that we see could really be skylights onto big subterranean chambers. But they are so deep that almost none of the light that enters the caves reflects back out.

The caves were formed long ago by flowing rivers of molten lava gushing from fissures in the side of the volcano. As the flow progresses, the tops and sides solidify. If the flow source stops, the remaining lava may pour out, leaving a hollow "tube" of rock.

The northwest flank of Olympus Mons would be an ideal place to look for such features. A host of igneous flow features, including lava tubes, have been identified in this area. The northern flank of the volcano is very close to the plains that were once the floor of a possible northern ocean. This means the caves might contain water or ice.

Now this paints a picture that’s even creepier than anything I’ve seen in science fiction movies. Imagine a nimble robot climbing into a pitch-black cavern to look for evidence of biological activity. There could be a host of robotic "insects" communicating via their own self-deploying "cellular" communications  network.  A flying probe may also be used  to navigate at greater distances over a rockfall-strewn cave floor.

What would the robotic explorers find?

There could be bizarre structures that superficially look like mineralogical deposits. Deep cave explorers on Earth find stringy structures dubbed “snottites” (oh yuck!).

These are made from a slimy mix of  bacteria and mucilaginous products and a little bit of minerals. The microbes are too small to see, yet they can build up the “snottite” structures.

Similarly, martian caves warmed by geothermal activity could offer truly unearth fantasy landscapes sculpted by multi-billion-year old organisms that have never seen sunlight, until someday when they are hit by the penetrating beam of a cave exploring robot dispatched from Earth. So our first contact with extraterrestrial life may be by coming face-to-face with something that looks like it's dripping out of your home plumbing.

Visit Mars in 3D and High-Defintition

December 09, 2008

Tonight I went to Mars. No, it wasn’t some drug-induced fantasy like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mars adventure in the 1990 film Total Recall.

A total of 362 three-dimensional images of Mars taken by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter went online today. The 3D views are assembled from pairs of pictures take at slightly different locations in the MRO’s orbit, much as the separation between your two eyes creates stereo vision.

Three-dimensional images of the Martian surface are not new, there have been a lot from the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity.  But the HiRISE camera has a crisp eagle-eye views that are simply unprecedented for their intimacy. It can see surface details down to the length of a yardstick.

The 3D images, or anaglyphs, can be viewed on the HiRISE Web site (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/anaglyph). You’ll need color filter glasses with a red and cyan lens. With the colored glasses, the red filter for the left eye sees only red in the picture, the cyan filter for the right eye sees only blue-green in the picture, and the brain correlates the images. For you parents, simply go though you’re selection of children’s books. If you were smart you bought your child one of any number of 3D storybooks with red-green glasses enclosed.

The Boston aristocrat-astronomer Percival Lowell, who popularized the notion of intelligent life on Mars, spent years gazing at Mars through a 24-inch refracting telescope. He simply could never have imagined that a century later people could fly over the martian surface through the electronic eyes of robots that traveled 100 million miles to get there.

Many of the pictures show water-etched gullies, rolling sand dunes, and geologically etched strata.  Many look comparatively tame in terms of 3D relief. But my favorites are those where you are staring down the walls of a five-mile high cliff in Vallis Marineris. You almost get vertigo seeing a smooth, slightly cratered plain suddenly drop off into the abyss. Big impact craters are intriguing. Yoo can easily see where the crust has folded up around the rim.

The 3D elevations are exaggerated of course, like those plastic relief maps of the United States that we all ran our fingers over in elementary school. I’m always amused when certain science-purists complain that enhancing topography like this is scientifically inaccurate. Sheesh, didn’t they ever make a flour, salt, and water model of a continent in elementary school?

3D imaging has been popular ever since the Victorian-era stereo-opticon was invented. As a child I spent endless hours looking at photographic travelogue disks in the View-Master hand held stereo viewer. My first 3D movie experience was the 1969  The Stewardesses which I watched analytically for its, uh, imaginative use of 3D cinematography. (the $2 million film grossed over $35 million – 3D pays off under the right circumstances!)

But my experience with the new Mars views is an unforgettable one. I imagined the day, centuries from now, when my far descendants will look at 3D images of life on the surface of an extrasolar planet, sent back by one of our robotic tourist to make all of humanity armchair virtual explorers.

Mars Rover Goes Back to Garage

December 06, 2008

NASA announced this week that the launch of the spiffy next generation Mars rover, called the Mars Science Lab (MSL), will be delayed from 2009 to 2011 because of technical problems.

The wait is worth it. The fundamental purpose of MSL is to explore the possibilities of microbial life ever existing on Mars, or lives there now. The potential for the reality of life off the Earth is one of the most fundamental and timeless questions of our civilization.

The MSL’s technical problems are principally with the rover's 31 actuator motors that are fundamentally mechanical arms containing a motor in a gearbox. They are the muscles of the rover. They basically do almost everything that the rover has to do: drive the wheels, brake the wheels, and are the elbow and shoulder and wrist joints for the robotic arms.

It will take a few months to fix the problem. But the next launch window to Mars isn’t until 2011, when Earth-Mars orbital geometry is optimal for an interplanetary flight.

There is some consternation that this will add $200-$400 million to the mission’s costs. And that might mean the delay of other planetary missions.

In a recent scathing editorial in the New York Times by the former NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science, Alan Stern, he chastised NASA for not better managing its budget. But in a rebuttal letter-to-editor, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, director of the Mars Society, pointed out that nearly anything major our country has ever undertaken has cost more than expected, including the Panama Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad.

The Hubble Space Telescope came in significantly over budget, and with technical flaws too. But hardly anyone today would say that HST wasn’t worth the cost. Just try and imagine where astronomy would be today if there never was a Hubble. Its cultural impact alone is immeasurable. “It has given us the universe,” said one astrophysicist.

Likewise, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite was over budget. But it revealed for the first time structure in the afterglow of the big bang – the seeds of the universe that would evolve into galactic structure. Looking at the cosmic microwave background was like “looking at the face of God,” quipped one scientist. The landmark discovery earned a Nobel Prize.

In contrast, America’s Superconducting Supercollider was killed in part because of cost overruns (it would have cost less than twice what Americans spend each year on skin care products). Where are we now? Europe’s Large Hadron Collider leads the world in breakthrough particle physics. (Though the super-machine is now suffering a super-repair cost of $29 million due to a helium leak that requires replacing most of its magnets.)

Of course this doesn’t justify giving government-funded science a blank check. But when it comes to exploring the planets NASA has done all the easy stuff first: planetary flybys and orbiters. But landing something the mass of an automobile on the surface of a planet is not easy. And Mars is unforgiving given the scorecard of one out of every two missions failing.

The MSL is three space vehicles in one. There is the 25-foot diameter Cruise Stage which keeps the spacecraft alive on its nine-month journey to Mars; the revolutionary Sky Crane descent stage that act as sort of a Mars helicopter that lowers the MSL on tether lines; And the nuclear powered rover itself.

“When you are doing things that have never been done before, you are likely to encounter difficulties, and they are almost always unforeseen because if you had foreseen them, you would have taken care of it earlier,” said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. In firmly controlling costs, “I'm hard put to think of any mission we ever do, . . . unless you just build more of what you built the last time, but nobody cares,” he said.

President John F. Kennedy expressed it best when in 1962 he committed the U.S. to landing humans on the moon: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, . . .”

This has been NASA’s mantra ever since then.

NASA’s setback with the MSL contrasts with the other big news item this week, the plight of the US automakers. I’d argue that the root of their problem lies in their failure to pursue risky, cutting edged technology for building innovative energy efficient cars for today’s gasoline-conscious market.

But it’s not all their fault in that, until gas prices peaked at $4/gallon, Detroit was giving American consumers what they wanted, big gas guzzling monster cars. After the gas shortage lines of the mid 1970s I imagined that by 2000 we’d be living in a Jetsons world of electric cars. No such luck.

Now the automakers are looking for a $35 billion bailout that is roughly equivalent to NASA’s entire space science budget for the next seven years.

To me the bottom line is: what monetary value do you put on finding the first evidence for life elsewhere in space? The realization that we are not alone in the universe is a cultural game-changer as big as the discovery of the New World. And, that doesn’t usually happen in one’s lifetime.

Planning a Road Trip on Mars

November 30, 2008

Like a tourist going over colorful travel brochures, the scientists planning for the next Mars rover are perusing a narrowed selection of potential landing sites. The criteria do not include the most photogenic landscapes (though given the orbital views, some sites look as dramatic as Arizona- Utah’s Monument Valley with its towering stratified buttes). Instead, geologists want to probe terrain where water once pooled in lakes, and perhaps provided an oasis for life on the Red Planet.

NASA’s Volkswagen-sized Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) scheduled for launch next year, will be a nuclear powered six wheeled vehicle. It will pack a powerful laser capable of vaporizing a thin layer from the surface of a rock to analyze its chemical composition.  If there were any sentient Martians, this would look like an H.G. Wells- type invading war machine dispatched from Earth.

Like its cousin, the Mars Phoenix Lander, the rover will collect rock and soil samples and place them inside onboard test chambers for chemical analysis. The rover will continue the search for organic compounds (not accomplished by the Phoenix) and sniff out atmospheric gases that may be associated with biological activity. The presence of patches of methane on Mars, which I blogged about earlier, may be caused by subsurface methanogenic bacteria. Unfortunately, an earlier candidate landing site where methane concentrations have been observed, Nillis Fossae, was taken off the list because it is too rough a terrain for the MSL to land.

NASA is intent on exploring the finalist sites because they all look like they were once submerged. This is easy to spot from orbit as layers of what looks like sedimentary rocks and clays and dried riverbeds. These strata must have formed billion of years ago when Mars was warmer and wetter. Some of this ancient geology has been exhumed by meteorite impacts.

And the finalists are:

Eberswalde Crater
A striking delta feature inside Eberswalde crater provides the first clear "smoking gun" evidence for on-going, persistent flow of water in some areas of Mars. Today the delta has hardened to form rock. Later, wind erosion stripped away the overlying rock, re-exposing the fossilized delta.

Mawrth Crater
Mawrth crater offers a glimpse into period of martian history when liquid water may have been at the surface.  The crater provides a window into the subsurface of Mars, revealing layered sedimentary deposits.  After the water dried up the surface solidified.  The surface outside the crater is relatively dark, while the interior wall of the crater exposes lighter, layered bedrock having different colors that could be from distinct water-bearing minerals.

Holden Crater
This crater has a dramatic landscape of rounded slopes and buttes consisting of alternating light and dark bands. They look like they might have resulted from sedimentation in a lake that once filled Holden Crater. There are many brightly colored, flat-lying, possible lakebeds near the bottom of the crater. After these lakebeds formed, a massive flood entered Holden Crater and deposited a layer of dark boulders and gravel. After the lake dried up, wind eroded the surface and formed the ripples and dunes seen in the valley.

Galle Crater
Mars orbiters have spied a large stack of layered sediments forming an outcrop in the southern part of this crater. The sedimentary layers inside the crater appear as bands and swirls wrapping around small hills and looking much like lines on a contour map. Some cracks stretching as long as one-half mile cut across the layers. There are several parallel gullies that originate at the inner crater walls of the southern rim.

The Ocean That Time Forgot

November 19, 2008

Four billion years ago a space probe dispatched from an extraterrestrial civilization might have swung through our solar system on a routine survey. It would have observed and dutifully reported back to its very unearthly-looking alien builders that two of the sun’s terrestrial planets had oceans.

It found that the third planet from the sun was completely covered in greenish water, rich in iron. The fourth planet from the sun looked more interesting because it had an ocean covering a third of the planet. Roiling volcanoes not far from the shoreline pumped carbon dioxide greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Both planets were cataloged into the Encyclopedia Galactica as potential homes for carbon-based life forms.

Fast-forward to four billion years later and another robot swoops over the dried up and dust covered ocean floor in the smooth northern wastelands. This probe, dispatched by inquisitive intelligent life forms living on the third planet from the sun, finds chemical evidence for a long forgotten ocean in the northern hemisphere.

Science fiction? Only partly. NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has found telltale concentrations of thorium, potassium, and iron just below the suspected shoreline of the Paleo-ocean, whose presence has been debated for years. The orbiter’s gamma-ray spectrometer detected radiation coming from minerals buried a foot beneath the soil. Unseen elements emit gamma rays when they are bombarded by high-energy charged particles from space, called cosmic rays.

Water flowing from Mars’ rugged southern highlands billions of years ago would have leached, transported and concentrated such elements just below the surface of an ancient ocean.

Adding to the intrigue is the discovery of the chemical outline of an inner shoreline marking a younger, smaller sea within the perimeter of the larger ocean and the size of North America. It might have existed later in martian history.

Ever since the arrival of NASA’s Mariner 9 probe in the early 1970s, photo-mapping from Mars orbit has show that dried-up water outflow channels all lead from the southern to the northern hemisphere. Laser altimetry from orbiters shows that the planet’s southern hemisphere is mostly ancient highlands where water would have flowed downhill toward the opposite hemisphere to collected in large seas.

Geologists quickly noted that the border between two geologically dissimilar areas in the northern lowlands is nearly level in elevation, suggesting an ancient coastline. The topography below this possible shoreline is much smoother than that of the region above at higher altitudes. This is consistent with smoothing by sedimentation. Also, a series of terraces run parallel to the apparent shoreline, bolstering the idea of receding waters.

One problem that has kept the polar ocean idea debatable is that shorelines look different from Earth's shorelines. Earth's coastal shorelines are largely sculpted by the action of powerful ocean tides caused by gravitational pull of the moon. But Mars lacks a sizable moon so the sculpting of the shoreline may have been notably different. This latest finding at last chemically traces the elusive shoreline.

This discovery ratchets up the circumstantial evidence for Mars being a living planet. Organisms may have appeared in the martian sea even before they appeared on Earth. Given the relentless raw power of biological evolution, the microbes would have adapted to the freezing, drying Martian surface in any number of ways, perhaps by going underground.

Despite all the hazards of traveling to Mars, which I’ve blogged about, I think I would jump at the chance if it meant walking across the frozen and dusted surface of an ancient sea. Imagine drilling down into that sea and encountering the 4-billion year old descendants of possibly the first form of life to appear in the newborn solar system.