Discovery Space: Next Generation

The Solar System's Greatest Hits

The biggest wallop ever suffered by any planet during the violent, turbulent early days of the solar system was when something as big as Mars slammed into the Earth with such force that the entire crust melted and splattered off into space. Some of it fell back, and much of the rest globbed together and became the moon. That's something scientists only managed to figure out after analyzing the rocks brought back from the moon by the Apollo astronauts.

The second biggest hit, it seems, was one suffered by Mars, when it got clobbered by something bigger than Pluto. That idea, which has been kicking around since the mid-80s, was not taken very seriously until this week, but now suddenly gets catapulted into being the likeliest explanation for the strange lopsided surface of the red planet.

The new evidence for a colossal impact that left a deep gouge on Mars that's bigger than Eurasia  came out in a trio of papers published this week in the journal Nature. One of the papers used recent spacecraft data to reconstruct the outline of the giant basin on Mars -- the largest impact remnant ever seen anywhere. The other two papers used computer modelling to figure out exactly how big the impacting body must have been, and how fast and at what angle it struck Mars.

These are major, significant papers that apparently solve one of the biggest remaining mysteries about our planetary system, the riddle of why Mars has two such radically different hemispheres. These papers, though they will undoubtedly be debated for a few years as is the norm for any significant shift in scientific understanding, will likely stand as among the most important advances in planetary astronomy in recent decades. (See these stories in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Discovery Channel  and National Geographic, for example)

One of those papers, an analysis of the size and direction of arrival of the impacting body, was done by a group at Caltech. And the lead author of the paper, Margarita Marinova, is a graduate student there. Kudos to Marinova for an important and groundbreaking piece of research.

Marinova, a graduate student in Caltech's Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, found that the impactor must have been between 1,600 and 2,700 km. across, producing a 100 billion gigaton blast. "This size range of impacts only occurred early in solar system history," Marinova says. It all happened about 4 billion years ago, around the same time as the moon-forming crash. Those early days of the solar system were very violent times, when the planetesimals from which the planets were built were still in flux and there was a whole lot of crashing going on.

Sometimes student work in science is thought of, especially by outsiders, as sort of practice work, a kind of second-class level of research. But most scientists know very well that this example, of truly significant new findings, is actually pretty typical. Much of the cutting-edge work in science, in fact, is the product of student research projects.

It's nice to be reminded of that from time to time, as in this case.

By the way, in that same issue of Nature there's a whole package of articles related to impacts on Earth, timed to the fact that this Monday, the 30th, will be the 100th anniversary of the biggest terrestrial impact known to have been witnessed by people -- the Tunguska blast over Siberia in 1908. Among that collection of articles is one that I wrote -- a sort of oral history of how our understanding of near-Earth asteroids and the danger they pose has evolved over the last few decades. It's accompanied by a very clever cartoon, depicting some of the pioneers in that field (who were the subjects of my interviews). I take no credit for the illustration -- the idea came from my friend and Nature's news and features editor, Oliver Morton, and was quite brilliantly executed by the artist David Parkins.

An Inch Deep in Wonderland

That title is a lovely phrase, plucked from a story today about the first wet-chemistry tests ever done off of the Earth, and it describes the location that the soil sample was taken from for that test: The bottom of one of two trenches the Phoenix Mars lander has dug in the immediate vicinity of its near-polar landing site, which the team have dubbed Wonderland and Snow White.

And what did Phoenix find there? A preliminary analysis from an experiment to test the soil chemistry shows that, far from being the deadly acidic soil some scientists expected, it's actually mildly alkaline -- good for planting asparagus, some reports point out (but only after you add some organic material to the soil, and add a nice greenhouse to filter out the sterilizing ultraviolet light and to keep it warm).

Garden soil! On Mars! And perhaps within our lifetimes, gardeners to take advantage of it, for a little high-tech subsistence farm in the first Mars settlements.

It occurs to me that we now have the information in hand to help make that possible. Until now, we've only had the most rudimentary sense of what the chemical makeup of Mars soil might be (and of course, now we're only learning what it is in one spot, but at least it's a start -- and it's a darned interesting spot).

Even with the rough analysis and guesswork we've had to live with, people have done some interesting work. Various groups have built "Mars jars" to test the potential of Martian soil to sustain various kinds of plant life. Israeli biologist Amos Nur did some of the best of these analyses of the soil's potential.

But that was all child's play. Now we have what the University of Arizona, where the mission was designed and is being run, calls a "treasure trove" of new data. How soon will it be before people start using that information?

And here's the thing: Just about anybody can start doing the research now, as the chemical details get published by the Phoenix team.

"We are awash in chemistry data," said Michael Hecht of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA, instrument on Phoenix.

By recreating the details of chemistry, as they are being unraveled by MECA and Phoenix's other lab, called the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, and the soil's structure as determined by its high-resolution microscope, people can now start doing the true experiments that may someday help those Martian colonists know what to plant, and how -- helping to create a sort of Farmer's Almanac for Mars.

It could be done at just about any level of complexity and detail -- anything from a killer science fair project to a really cutting edge Masters or Doctoral thesis topic to a lifetime's worth of professional study. Just jump right in there at whatever level you may be, dammit! There are many thousands of different species of edible plants known, and many different ways of planting, cultivating and harvesting them. There's virtually no limit to how many different ways people could approach the research. The more the better. Let's start developing the veggies that the future Martians -- are you one of them? -- are going to live on.

Future farmers of Mars, get to it!

(Photos courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute).

Sailing Through Space -- Or Something Like It

There are a lot of different aspects to traveling in space, especially the kinds of long-duration flights required to get to another planet, or to spend a stint on the International Space Station.

Some elements of those missions can be simulated on Earth, and many can't. But among those that can are the physical and psychological demands of spending a long time in a small space under challenging and occasionally life-threatening conditions.

A small sailing vessel from Australia called Berrimilla is going through a voyage right now that captures some of those elements -- it's making a long trip from Australia to England, by way of the Canadian Arctic. It's partly adventure, partly education (they're blogging all the way, and taking lots of pictures and videos, some of which can be seen in real time and some will be compiled into educational programs at the journey's end).

And because the interest of the two-person crew parallels with space exploration, it drew the attention of some friends in high places: They did a live video linkup with the crew of the ISS during an earlier voyage, to talk about some of their similar trials and joys. Following that journey, they were invited by the ISS astronauts to give a presentation to a symposium at Louisiana State University about risk and exploration, specifically drawing analogies between their voyage and a trip to Mars.

This latest trip, the two sailors say on their website, "seemed like a neat idea and there were lots of suggestions about how it could be used for educational purposes -- the whole concept is full of opportunities to demonstrate aspects of science, history, environmental change, planning and human relationships in difficult circumstances."

Soon, one of the journey's intended stops will be specifically geared toward astronomy and space travel.

They're aiming for a stopover at Devon Island, home of NASA's long-running research project and simulated Mars base at Haughton Crater, the Haughton Mars Project. In fact, the whole trip came about as a result of a suggestion from that project's leader, NASA-Ames scientist Pascal Lee, who drew the itinerary for the trip on a cocktail napkin and challenged the Berrimilla crew to carry it out.

And there's one more thing about that plan: They're aiming to get to Devon Island in time for a very special event. As luck would have it, on August 1 the Haughton Mars Project will get a rare treat, as the path of totality of a total eclipse of the sun passes right through the center of the island. Berimilla's crew hopes to get there just in time.

They're in Alaska right now, in the fishing village of Unalaska, on schedule to make it to Devon on time if the winds and the sea-ice cooperate. Good luck to the Berrimilla crew for their voyage, and to the team at Haughton crater for viewing the eclipse!

Photo: courtesy of Haughton Mars Project

A Chance to Touch Astronomical History

It was one of the most revolutionary books in the history of science. And, as it happens, it's about revolutions, of a different kind. And now some lucky college students will have a chance to touch a piece of history.
Nicolaus Copernicus not only changed astronomy forever, he changed humanity's sense of its place in the scheme of things. The Danish astronomer's book "de revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (on the revolution of the celestial spheres), published in 1543, was the first scientific work to remove the Earth from the center of the universe, and to explain the motion of the Earth in an orbit around the sun, along with the other planets, pretty much as we understand it today.
Copernicus knew that the book would be denounced by the church, and was reluctant to have it published even though he was certain of the scientific truth of its claims. It finally appeared in print in the year he died.
The book is considered by many to be the beginning of modern astronomy, and a major milestone in the scientific revolution that took place in the renaissance.
Only a few first edition copies of the book survive, and those are worth upwards of a million dollars. More copies remain of a second edition, published just a few years later, and those are worth about a tenth as much.
Richard French, an astronomy professor at Wellesley College, has been trying to acquire a copy for the college library for years, and recently fulfilled the dream. Thanks to a donation from a Wellesley alum, he was able to land a second-edition copy of the book for Wellesley's collection, and his students will now have a chance to see the epochal work for themselves.
Wellesley had previously acquired first editions of two other, much later revolutionary scientific books:  Isaac Newton's "Principia Mathematica," which laid the foundations of modern physics, and Charles Darwin's "on the Origin of Species," which was the first description of the theory of evolution.
The Boston Globe quotes Wellesley sophomore Katie Judd saying "It's kind of cool to just look at this book, because I did my 10th-grade scientific report on it."
French points out that while Copernicus got most of the theory right, he got one crucial point wrong: He thought the Earth and the other planets moved in circular orbits, rather than the ellipses we now know they follow. He says it's important for students to see how even the greatest innovators in science still make mistakes.
French says the book, which was previously owned by a private collector, will now have a chance to have much greater impact by being part of the college's library, where many students will have a chance to see it for themselves over the coming years.

The Ice Planet Mars

No, it's not a surprise, though some of the news reports have made it seem that way. We've actually known for decades that Mars has huge deposits of regular, plain old water ice -- a very exciting thing, since water is the staff of life as we know it. And unlike other ice-covered or ice-filled bodies, like comets, or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which are always very, very, very cold, on Mars the temperatures do sometimes climb above the freezing point. So liquid water is possible there, at least a bit below the surface in certain places -- and, though this is controversial, possibly even on the surface sometimes.

The air on Mars is so thin that it's practically a vacuum, though, so any exposed water, or even any exposed ice, turns to vapor very quickly. But pictures from as far back as the Viking mission in the 1970s even showed occasional frost on the ground in the early morning, just after sunrise. The presence of ice near the surface, and some water vapor in the atmosphere, is why Mars is such an exciting place for astrobiologists -- or for anybody who is interested in the possibility of life elsewhere. Especially since we know that in the very early days of Mars, around 4 billion years ago, water actually flowed across the surface and may have formed lakes or even an ocean. That's what makes Mars the most Earth-like place we know of besides, you know, Earth.

So, as I was saying, the fact that the new Phoenix lander on Mars has proved the existence of ice just beneath the surface, which was announced at a press conference yesterday, is not really a surprise. That's what Phoenix was mostly designed for, in fact -- to study the ice, by melting bits of it in tiny ovens, to see what chemicals it contains, and whether the kinds of molecules needed by living creatures are present there.

So, what was just announced -- little bits of ice just below the surface, which were revealed by Phoenix's trench-digging tool, and which had vaporized within a few days -- is not at all surprising, but it is very important. It means that the hoped for ice is present at the place where Phoenix touched down, close to the northern polar region of Mars, and that it's very close to the surface and easy to reach.

That's pretty much what Phoenix chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona and the rest of the science team had hoped, and even expected. But hoping and expecting is a very different thing from actually proving it on the ground.

So this means there's every chance that, despite some mechanical and software glitches, the mission will be able to do what it set out to do, and could end up providing better evidence than ever before that Mars may be a habitable place.

But, contrary to other reports you may have read, one thing Phoenix will not do is prove whether there are any living organisms there now, or ever were in the past. That's because even though it has equipment to carry out the most detailed chemical tests ever done on Mars, as well as the highest-resolution microscopy, it does not have anything that could detect signs of life itself. And that's a darn shame.

The Viking mission, 32 years ago, was the only Mars mission that ever carried life-detection equipment, and it's results were controversial. The scientist in charge of one of the three life detection experiments on that mission is absolutely convinced that it did find life. Other members of the science team thought not. There's a very simple followup experiment that could prove it one way or the other, but in all these years, with four successful landers (and a few failures) on the planet since then, nobody has bothered to send that followup test.

What, the question of whether Earth is or isn't the only place in the universe with life isn't important enough to be worth checking?

Well, if Phoenix finds signs suggesting that the conditions for life are present, maybe that will spur NASA, or ESA, or JAXA, or somebody to go and look. Let's hope so.

The Phoenix mission, by the way, is the first mission ever sent to another planet whose control center, instead of being at a NASA center (or a Russian government space center) is actually on a college campus. It's located at the University of Arizona in Tucson. That's a wonderful new trend, and hopefully will offer some lucky students there a chance to watch, and maybe even participate in, a cutting edge planetary exploration mission. I'll be talking to them soon, and will report on how the presence of a Mars Mission Control on campus is affecting the students there.

(Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University)

Who's an Astronaut's Best Friend?

On Mars, a robot might be your best buddy. And a contest last week helped to prove the point.

Imagine you're a scientist on Mars in the early days of the human exploration of the red planet -- oh, say, a couple decades from now. Oh alright, a few decades.

You're exploring the terrain, searching for important geological clues to the planet's history, or for sources of water or other important local resources for the base, or maybe for traces of life. Then without warning a rock gives way, you stumble, and all of a sudden you're immobilized with a broken leg and a dwindling oxygen supply. Your crewmates are miles away exploring another section.

Fear not! Your faithful rover shows up in the nick of time, carrying a spare bottle of oxygen and some basic materials that you can use to fashion a splint.

Or something like that. Anyway, that's the basic concept behind one part of the Mars Society's annual competition of robots designed and built by college students around the country -- the University Rover Challenge. In this test, the roving robots had to cross unfamiliar terrain and locate a simulated stricken astronaut in order to deliver first-aid supplies. The only information they were given was the astronaut's last known position, and they had only 35 minutes to locate him. It's a situation that could possibly, in our lifetimes, become a life-or-death reality.

Of several teams entered, only one, from Oregon State University, actually found the astronaut (which was actually an empty spacesuit lying on the desert floor), and took away the prize. Georgia Tech placed second and Iowa State third, even though they didn't actually reach the goal, by each coming within a few meters of the astronaut.  The winners will get all expenses paid for five team members to attend the Mars Society's annual convention in August (and stay tuned to this spot in coming weeks -- I'll let you know more about this fascinating annual Marsfest).

Besides this Emergency Location challenge, the other sections of the competition involved one other logistics task -- fastening steeply-leaning contruction panels in place with nuts and bolts -- and two science tasks -- one that involved analyzing samples of soil for various characteristics, and the other involving geological examination of the area using different wavelengths of light. All of the tasks had to be completed by the robots within a 35-minute contest period.

The competition was held at the Mars Society's simulated Mars base in the Utah desert, called the Mars Desert Research Station, on June 6 and 7. About 60 students from ten universities in the US and Europe participated in the contest. Oregon not only won the astronaut rescue but the overall competition. University of Nevada, Reno placed second, and York University of Toronto came third.

Congratulations to all of the winners, and to all of the other competitors who worked hard but didn't get the glory. You've all helped to play a part in paving humanity's way to a biplanetary future.

CMU Students Test Lunar Drilling

It wasn't the moon, but it sure looked like it.

Teams of scientists from NASA centers and universities spent the last couple of weeks out in Moses Lake Sand Dunes, a stretch of very desolate desert in Washington state. On very lunar-like terrain, they were testing a whole range of prototype vehicles and equipment that might be used in the nest decade or so by astronauts on the moon. The lunar rovers, bulldozers, transporters, spacesuits and drills that went through their paces were an amazingly weird, otherworldly, and ingenious collection of devices, and the tests were a great success -- in spite of the fact that, just to add to the difficulty of the testing, they went through unprecedented swings of temperature for the area, and had to endure sand storms as well.

Which is fine for testing purposes, because whatever they go through here, the moon is bound to be even more harsh and difficult.

Drilling on the moon may one day turn out to be crucial for getting at the resources future lunar settlements will need to survive, such as ice that could provide a source of drinking water as well as oxygen to breathe and rocket fuel (by separating its molecules into oxygen and hydrogen). Drills might also be needed to extract important resources from the moon, minerals that might be used for construction there or might be valuable commodities to ship back to Earth. But drilling in such a harsh and unforgiving location is no easy task.

That's where a team of students from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh come in. They were part of a team that developed a sophisticated automated drilling rig, mounted on a robotic vehicle, to carry out deep lunar drilling. Their machine was one of those tested this week in Utah, and it passed its tests with flying colors.

There's a nice gallery of pictures and a video from the desert tests, on the NASA website.

(photos courtesy of NASA)

Teams of scientists from NASA centers and universities spent the last couple of weeks out in Moses Lake Sand Dunes, a stretch of very desolate desert in Washington state. On very lunar-like terrain, they were testing a whole range of prototype vehicles and equipment that might be used in the nest decade or so by astronauts on the moon. The lunar rovers, bulldozers, transporters, spacesuits and drills that went through their paces were an amazingly weird, otherworldly, and ingenious collection of devices, and the tests were a great success -- in spite of the fact that, just to add to the difficulty of the testing, they went through unprecedented swings of temperature for the area, and had to endure sand storms as well.

Which is fine for testing purposes, because whatever they go through here, the moon is bound to be even more harsh and difficult.

Drilling on the moon may one day turn out to be crucial for getting at the resources future lunar settlements will need to survive, such as ice that could provide a source of drinking water as well as oxygen to breathe and rocket fuel (by separating its molecules into oxygen and hydrogen). Drills might also be needed to extract important resources from the moon, minerals that might be used for construction there or might be valuable commodities to ship back to Earth. But drilling in such a harsh and unforgiving location is no easy task.

That's where a team of students from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh come in. They were part of a team that developed a sophisticated automated drilling rig, mounted on a robotic vehicle, to carry out deep lunar drilling. Their machine was one of those tested this week in Utah, and it passed its tests with flying colors.

There's a nice gallery of pictures and a video from the desert tests, on the NASA website.

(photos courtesy of NASA)

British Students Build Dustbin for Space

A team of 20 students at the University of Leicester, UK, are getting an opportunity that rarely comes to undergraduates anywhere: Over the next few months, they will be building a satellite that will be launched into space next year -- and is expected to work ten times better than any previous satellite of its kind.

The satellite, called PLUME, will be carrying out a mission that may sound a tad unglamorous. It's going to collect dust. But in space, dust is actually a very important, even precious, substance.

Dust particles floating around in the solar system are actually remnants of the material from which all the planets, moons, asteroids and comets orginally formed. Studying these particles is one of the very few ways we can learn about that primordial matter, and understand how our planet was born.
For example, just this week, a new kind of mineral was named. This new mineral had not only never been seen before, it had never even been imagined as a theoretical possibility. Where was it found? You guessed it: inside a tiny speck of dust from space.
In this case, the dust mote was collected without quite technically going into space, from a high-flying U2 airplane. The new mineral was given the name Brownleeite -- a tribute to Don Brownlee, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle who has been a pioneer in the study of comets and asteroids (another story about the new mineral is here). Brownlee is also the guy who was in charge of the Stardust mission, which four years ago collected particles of dust from a comet, and then brought them back to Earth to be analyzed.
But the new PLUME satellite, which is being designed and built by undergraduates, and will be managed by them, is going to be capable of collecting and analyzing dust particles from Earth's immediate environment that are ten times smaller than any previous satellite could do, according to the university's website (check it out here).

“The nanometeoriod detector on PLUME will allow us to analyze dust particles that are smaller than ever before" said Laura Evans, one of the project's leaders.

Philip Peterson, a second-year student working on the project, said: "I'm an undergraduate, and I'm building a satellite. It's just incredible. There aren't many universities in the country where I could get to do something like this."

The tiny cube-shaped satellite, about the size of a toaster, will be launched in mid-2009. I'll keep tabs on how things are going. Watch this space, and I'll give progress reports as this team of students gets closer to their launch date -- and especially after their tiny dustbin makes it into space and starts doing its work.

3-2-1--GLAST Off!

After several delays in the launch date, yesterday the latest of NASA's large space astronomy observatory satellites made it into orbit, carried aloft by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral. Initial checkouts indicate that all systems are working well. The satellite is called GLAST, for Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope. NASA has detailed information about the new telescope, its instruments and its plans, on their website. They also have video of the launch itself. And there's more background information here.

"After a 60-day checkout and initial calibration period, we'll begin science operations," said Steve Ritz, GLAST project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "GLAST soon will be telling scientists about many new objects to study, and this information will be available on the internet for the world to see."

As I mentioned last week, people around the country and around the world have a chance to contribute to the science that will be gained from this new gamma-ray telescope. It's important to coordinate ground-based optical observations with the high-energy detections of gamma-rays (which don't make it through the atmosphere to the ground). Students, amateur astronomers, and astronomy faculty who have access to medium-sized or larger telescopes, or who are willing to spend time analyzing images, can play a role. Check out the information on how to sign up for the Global Telescope Network here, at a site run by Sonoma State University in California.

As the mission unfolds, I'll provide some progress reports here about how it's doing, what it's finding, and about how people on campuses everywhere end up contributing to the science.

Are you a student who is working on this, or a professor working with students on it? Please add your thoughts and comments here, I'd love to hear from you.  Or just an interested reader? I'm interested in your thoughts too.

What Color is the Red Planet?

No, seriously.

It may sound like one of those classic dumb questions, like who's buried in Grant's Tomb or what color was the Old Gray Mare. But it's not.

Determining, and reproducing accurately, the true colors of Mars is a surprisingly complicated  thing to do, and sometimes there are no clear-cut "right" answers. But some students from Florida are helping to get us a little closer.

In fact, there have been arguments about how to get the most accurate color balance on  images of Mars ever since the first color images came back from spacecraft in the '70s. Some of the very first images sent back from the surface, by the Viking landers in '76 -- iconic images that have continued to be reproduced ever since -- had a strongly exaggerated orange shade. They just didn't have time to do much color correction before the first image releases, and some of those versions just keep getting reproduced.

But it's not easy to balance those color images to make them as accurate as possible. And exactly what does that mean, anyway?

Color is a surprisingly subjective phenomenon, and reproducing colors requires a lot of judgement calls. That's why Fuji film has a distinctly different look from Kodak film, for instance. (Remember film?) And why things look different in daylight than under incandescent lights, and different again under fluorescents.

And CCDs and other electronic detectors all have their own, distinct color response curves. Most spacecraft images, like those from the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and from the newly-landed Phoenix, use a set of filters to provide several different wavelength bands. But those filters, and the inherent responses of the detectors, don't actually match the distinctive color responses of the color-detecting cone cells on the human retina.

So how do they go about reconstructing a set of black and white images taken through filters that don't quite match the human eye into an accurate color image -- something that looks more or less the way it would look to you or me if we were standing there on Mars right now?

Very carefully.

Mars has been known as the "red planet" since antiquity. But most of the images you've seen have probably exaggerated the redness of the surface, partly just because that's what meets everyone's expectations. But the way the imaging team goes about adjusting the colors is by using targets.
Basically, the targets consist of little swatches of color -- the kind of thing you'd check out at the  paint store. If there are swatches of color on the spacecraft, and it uses its camera to take pictures of itself through its color filters, then by twiddling the dials in a digital imaging program, you can make the onboard swatches look as close as possible to the identical ones that were left on Earth.
The Mars rovers had very simple swatches, and they still left a lot of room for arguments over the most accurate colors (see some arguments here). Now, thanks to some Florida students and their professors, the Phoenix craft has got a much better set of color targets.
University of Central Florida Physics and Astronomy Professor Dan Britt and two students there, working with University of Florida chemistry professor Randy Duran and his students, developed the new color targets, using the lessons learned from watching the Mars rover targets over the last four years to help guide their improvements.

In coming weeks, we'll see more and more of the color images that will result from the new calibration targets. (The highest-resolution soil image ever sent back from Mars was just released yesterday -- but not in color.)
“It was amazing to provide students with an opportunity to create something that could make history in space,” Duran said, according to a story in the  UF newspaper. (And to be fair, here's one from the UCF paper)

As they continue work on the calibration of the latest images from Mars over the coming weeks, we'll keep checking in on them to see how it's all working. Watch this space.

photos:NASA/JPL/UF