Discovery Space: Next Generation

NASA-JPL is a Hotbed of Student Activity

About 300 students at all levels, from high school through graduate school, have been working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California over the summer. And the 25 different programs that the lab offers for students are not just summer work -- about half of them are academic-year positions.

And they span the gamut, from engineering to data analysis to planetary science.

These are amazing opportunities for anyone interested in working in space science of any kind. Here's just a few examples of the work students have been doing at what is certainly the world's premier center for designing and operating planetary exploration missions. (No offense to Ames, which is NASA's other principal planetary research center, but which doesn't actually build and operate as many robotic missions).

-- Yuri Carillo, 18, is a sophomore in electrical engineering Cal Poly who has been working there this summer. She actually put in her first stint working at JPL while she was still in high school. She's worked on a gadget to help a Mars robot change drill bits, and on batteries for a future rover. "Before I came I thought it was going to be very serious and uptight, and then I realized it's more like a college campus," she says.

-- Brandon Jones, at 28, is a bit farther along -- he's a PhD student in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado who has been working on satellite navigation systems, tracking the positions of the GPS satellites that are used to track everything else. He spent a previous summer working at Johnson Space Center in Houston, so he's really racking up his mileage at NASA.

-- It's not just hard-core technology types who can find a niche at JPL. Take Erin Edkins: She's a 28-year old student who spent time as a personal fitness trainer and a restaurant manager before deciding to go back to school in planetary science at  UC Santa Barbara. Now a senior there, she's putting in her second summer at JPL. She works on planetary atmospheres and is analyzing the swirling storm systems on Jupiter.

As part of that job, she enjoys being often the first person to see new planetary images that arrive from a distant planet. Her advice to other students is to just go ahead and apply for a JPL internship, as she did.

"Go for it," she says. "Definitely the worst thing that could happen is you could contact someone to work with at JPL and they say no. Then you're in the same position you started in."

You can read up on JPL's student opportunities on their web site. There's something for just about anybody who's interested in doing space-related work. Go ahead, give it a try!

photos: top, Yuri Carillo. bottom, Erin Edkins. photos courtesy of NASA/JPL.

Guest Blogger: A Student's Eyes on the Skies

This is the first of a new regular feature for Next Generation, a guest blog by a student scientist. If you're a student working in the areas of astronomy, space research or any related field and would like to write a guest blog post in coming weeks, let me know at dlc@davidlchandler.com.

Today's blogger is Rachael Beaton, a first-year graduate student at the University of Virginia who has had a chance to make observations at some of the world's leading observatories, including the newly-commissioned Large Binocular Telescope outside Tucson, Arizona. She has already made a significant discovery -- a dwarf galaxy that is within our local group, a companion to Andromeda, but is moving too fast to be part of the group and must be just passing through.

Here's Rachael's post:

The job description for a graduate student in astronomy can seem fairly grim on paper. We spend our days in class, working towards the ivory towers of our "dissertation", attacking our homework assignments, grading papers and doing whatever tasks fall under the definition of "teacher's assistant."

When we’re lucky, in the evenings we escape our offices and teach sections of observing labs or operate telescopes for introductory classes. This can make for a grueling eighteen to twenty hour day.

If we had a union, we'd most certainly strike and picket the department chair for less work -- but I must admit that I have been somewhat dishonest in my portrayal and have left out the perks of the job.

For a handful of nights every year, we astronomers pack our bags, fill up our coffee cups and settle into an observatory to collect the data we spend the remaining 350 odd days of the year trying to understand.

In an effort to avoid the lighting that accompanies modern life, astronomical observatories have been pushed to highest, driest, most remote and -- by no coincidence -- most beautiful portions of the earth. Getting to these sites make all the trials of air travel only the beginning of the trip. Access roads to observatories vary greatly. Observatories like Kitt Peak outside of Tucson, AZ, for example, have luxuriously separate lanes for each direction of travel.

In contrast, the Multiple Mirror Telescope has one dirt lane with few guard rails, stomach wrenching over looks and can result in white rental cars changing to a delightful shade of brown (oops). When making the trip in the evening headlights are not allowed, once requiring me to lean out of the passenger window with a flash light to illuminate the road ahead.

Finally, the jet-lagged astronomer arrives at the helm of a multi-million (or even multi-billion?) dollar facility, jived more on anticipating the night ahead than on the gallons of coffee downed on the journey. Or, in my case, doses of Dramamine.

Large aperture telescopes ( > 4 meters in diameter) are magnificent feats of engineering. I don't think I've been introduced to one that hasn't taken my breath away. They have the same majesty of Roman architecture, one feels dwarfed and yet is so taken by awe as to feel a part of the structure itself.

Despite their enormity, modern telescopes move with the greatest of ease to any point in the sky. Its a sin to come so far and not spend a significant amount of time admiring the object that does the brunt of the work for your data collection. Normally, I watch the sunset and take in the telescope, as the telescope operator puts in the last bits of liquid nitrogen to keep the instrument cool for the night. As the Sun sinks below the horizon, the real romance of astronomy begins. I take my seat at the instrument controls, and the operator theirs by the telescope controls.

My thesis project involves a deep survey of the outer limits of the Andromeda galaxy in an attempt to characterize its newly discovered stellar halo.

Often the data I collect are the very first deep images of a region of the night sky. So, when the first image in a field comes up on the computer screen, mine are the first eyes to trace the stars and count the galaxies that it contains.

Viewing your data for the first time is the most exciting part of observing. Sometimes it's breathtaking in its perfection, and other times it''s numbing in its unforeseen problems (winds, bad focus, or pointing inaccuracies). During the course of the night, I routinely go outside and check the weather. Naked eye astronomy at ~10,000 feet is incredible. The skies are alive with stars and the arms of the Milky Way are encompassing, seeming to embrace the Earth within them.

What is more impressive, however, is that the telescope is pointed at an area on that sky that is infinitely dark to my eyes, but that is revealed to be replete with stars and galaxies. Its times like these that the hours spent bent over a computer or an assignment feel so worthwhile. Every night that I observe, I get reminded of the awe and curiosity that fuel my scientific endeavors. Once and again, I fall helplessly in love with astronomy.

The last perk to being an astronomer is seeing the sun both rise and set on a single day.

Most people are lucky or perhaps loathe to see either, let alone both. Just as I watched the sunset from the telescope dome to start my night, I watch it rise from there to end the night. Sometimes I see that the telescope operator too has paused in his work to stow the telescope to watch the Sun return. When our eyes meet, it's one of those wordless conversations that one can have with someone they do not know well.

At the end of the night, I receive a call from my adviser. As my eyes droop and the adrenaline from the night begins to fade, I mumble a report for the night. Then pack up my things and head down to the dorms to grab a few hours of sleep before starting it all over again.

Observing  is a very solitary event and I am usually craving the company of friends and family by the end, but even so leaving the mountain is sorrowful. I spend the afternoons scrambling around the observatory taking in the scenery and getting my fill of the desert. At night, though accompanied by the operator, I spend much of my time lost in my own thoughts about the data that we have, the data we’re taking and the data to take next. This, however, is only a muted form of the astronomer's romance.

Before the advent of the CCD camera, the astronomer prepared glass plates, rode with the telescope all night and then developed the plates, getting only a glance of sleep before doing it all again.

Still, even in its isolation, observing is what drives the observational astronomer. It's only with the collection of new data that we really get to stretch our legs into new discovery and push the limits of our field. I spend most of my time locked into that grim job description of the ever working graduate student, but for a few precious nights a year, I feel more like Columbus sailing through uncharted waters in search of the Indies, except I ride on the back of a telescope, my oceans stretch to the very limits of the Universe and I am searching for whatever the data will reveal.

Photos: top, Rachael with the KPNO 4 meter in the background (by George Trammell); middle, University of Virginia graduate students with the Large BinocularTelescope; bottom, access road to Cerro Tololo Intercontinental Observatory, Chile

Carnival of Space #67: Planets, Rockets, Books and Olympic Torches

Welcome to episode 67 of the Carnival of Space! I'm delighted to have a chance to host this roundup of interesting new blog posts on space and astronomy for the first time, and there's a lot to write about.

This blog, if you haven't visited before, is focused on the work of college students who are involved in astronomy and/or space exploration. The collection of postings described here don't relate directly to students, but they should be of interest to anybody, students included, who is fascinated by the stars and planets and by humanity's efforts to move out toward them. Welcome aboard!

For starters, there are a lot of interesting posts this week on the past, present and future of the human space program.

There's a fascinating bit of space history on David Portree's Altair VI blog, recalling the thoughts of a top space engineer during the heady days of the Apollo program in the 1960s. It casts an interesting light on what could have, should have happened after the first moon landings, and the squandered opportunities that could have been carried forward with minimal extra investment.

Bringing us up the present and near future, Political Action for Space takes a look at Congressional candidate Pete Olson's views about the space program's future and the retirement of the space shuttle, and encourages everyone to grill their own local representatives on their views.  Next Big Future looks at one of the specific issues that needs to be faced as we move toward having people go farther and spend more time in space: how to deal with radiation problems. And 21st Century Waves looks at the future of our space program and lunar exploration plans in terms of the economic impact of exploration, and has some interesting thoughts on Mike Griffin and NASA's plans.

Moving from the big picture to a close look at details of space travel, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel takes a close look at how liquids behave in space, complete with some intetresting video clips, on Starts With a Bang.

There's also a lot of postings this week on the latest in planetary news. Cassini recently made an amazingly close pass of Saturn's moon Enceladus and returned some lovely and enigmatic images. There's a nice description of the technical challenge of such a close flyby on Catholic Sensibility, and a collection of some of the puzzling pictures on Meridiani Journal. And Emily Lakdawalla does her usual thorough job of analyzing the pictures one by one on her Planetary Society Weblog, always a must-see blog for all news planetary.

Meanwhile, the summer's glut of new findings from Mars continues. In Cumbrian Sky, Stuart Atkinson has some nice reflections on Phoenix's exploration there, and how it's going in a different direction that the Mars rovers but nevertheless exciting. Dave Mosher talks about the new perchlorate discovery in his Space Disco. And then there's the discovery of clay minerals, which raises questions about the possibility of past life there, mentioned in a post on Meridiani Journal.

Some thoughts on a different way of looking at the debate over the definition of a planet, focusing on the time parameter instead of on current status, is on the Lounge of the Lab Lemming. And a nice recap of the history of the century-ago impact over Tunguska, Siberia is on A Mars Odyssey.

Moving farther out into the cosmos, a couple of posts this week look at a newly-discovered celestial oddity called Hanny's Voorwerp. A Babe in the Universe describes how the strange galactic object was discovered by a schoolteacher as part of a massive online search of new sky images. And Centauri Dreams takes this odd object as a starting point for looking at some of the possible implications for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And Chris Lintott's Universe looks at the way this strange discovery has been covered in the popular press.

For those who would rather actually look at the sky than sit and ponder about it, some offerings include a guidebook to the constellation Saggitarius and its many denizens, on Visual Astronomy. And moving in from the gigantic to the infinitesimal, Ian O'Neill muses on the Higgs Boson and what is going to be found at the new Large Hadron Collider in his AstroEngine blog.

There's some really fun summer reading, for kids on up to adults, in  Out of the Cradle, which has a wonderful roundup of books about women and girls involved in space travel and astronomy. It's a great collection to inspire girls to realize that space really is not just an interest for boys, and for women who've already figured that out and just want some fun reading material.

I suppose you thought that this week's wall-to-wall news coverage of the Beijing Olympics is one area that really has nothing to do with our topics of space and astronomy, right? Wrong! Two different posts this week make the connection. CollectSpace has a description of the whole bunch of astronauts, cosmonauts and taikonauts who took part in the Olympic torch relay. And Kentucky Space's Jeff Manber reflects at length on the commentary about the Chinese space program in the Olympic coverage, and other thoughts about that whole program. Who knew?

Finally, some interesting philosophical musings on humanity's destiny and the meaning of life, and how our ambitions in exploring the planets fit into these larger themes, triggered by the reading of a couple of science fiction novels, in this post on Music of the Spheres.

(Photos: Top, Apollo 11 image from the moon; Middle, Enceladus image, courtesy of NASA; Bottom, Hanny's Voorwerp, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.)

Celestial Roundup

Today, we'll have a little grab-bag of items. Fill up your plate, it's an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord!

Telescopes without mountains

You don't have to be on a high mountaintop in Arizona, Hawaii or Chile to do astronomy. Although more and more colleges and universities are now equipped to run distant observatories from computer consoles on campus, there's nothing quite like the experience of actually working at the telescope itself, and plenty of campuses have or are getting telescopes nearby, wherever they may be, to offer hands-on experiences to their students -- and the capability of doing real research. It's a big sky out there, and among the billions and billions of celestial objects to observe, there are plenty of worthwhile observing programs that can be conducted from less-than-optimal sites.
So, here's one new example: Purdue University Calumet, in Indiana, just announced last week that they are proceeding, with the help of a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, to get a 20-inch advanced Ritchy-Chretien telescope, which will be set up in an observatory in a nearby state park. It will be equipped for robotic observations from campus, but also can be used by students from the university, as well as special field trips by local high schools, to get that firsthand experience.
“Purdue Calumet students will soon have the ability to learn the science of astronomy through discovery from authentic data that they themselves obtain with the robotic telescope," says Shawn Slavin, a professor of astronomy at the university.

Portal to the Universe

It sounds like a device from a science-fiction story, sort of like the "stargate" in 2001. But no, this is a project, organized as part of the International Year of Astronomy (next year), to provide a comprehensive guide to the astronomy related websites, news, clubs, observatories, image sources, and so on. At their website, they are inviting people to contribute links and information on any sources that fit this bill.
They plan to launch the site at the end of the year. It looks like it will be a useful resource for all of us, if it works out. Good luck to them, and I envite everyone to help out by contributing information on sites, groups and facilities that you are involved in or know about.

Fly your Thesis

The European Space Agency has just announced a new program, similar to NASA's longstanding Microgravity University, which I described here in an earlier post (and gave a specific example of in another post).
ESA's program is smaller in scope -- far fewer students will get to participate, and they'll have to wait much longer to do so. But it's also structured to foster more ambitious use of the opportunity. As with NASA's program, students are invited to propose experiments that can be flown aboard an airplane that provides brief periods of weightlessness by flying on a roller-coaster-like trajectory of parabolic hills and valleys.
The NASA program is aimed at undergraduates, and students generally propose experiments that may be part of a class project, or may just be an ad-hoc idea that a group of students come up with. ESA, on the other hand, is looking for graduate students who want to do work that will actually be part of their thesis research.
I'm delighted to see that European students will now have an opportunity to share in the kinds of experiences that American students have been able to take part in for more than a decade. And although fewer will get to take part, it's an admirable idea to use these opportunities to foster advanced level serious research. I look forward to seeing what kinds of projects will result.

Students in the Dark

Finally, a footnote to the coverage by my fellow bloggers Dave Mosher and Alan Dyer about the August 1 total solar eclipse.
I was very envious reading their accounts of their adventures watching the eclipse from two different airplanes. I've see four total eclipses in my life, and they are definitely one of the two number-one all time greatest categories of skywatching experiences (see Alan Dyer's posting on his rating system of the top celestial sights) I've ever had the pleasure of seeing (the other category that equals it being an all-sky auroral display, which I saw in spring of 1988). But it's been a long time since the last one I saw -- which was awesome and spectacular, on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii in 1991, surrounded by the world's leading telescopes.
Anyway, I just read an item about a couple of lucky undegraduates, Katie Dupre and Marcus Freeman, who got a chance to see this latest eclipse in the company of the world's leading eclipse researcher, Jay Pasachoff of Williams College. For Jay, this was his 47th eclipse! The lucky dog. They watched it near Novosibirsk, Siberia, and took part in research on the sun's inner corona, which can only be observed during total eclipses.

(Photos: Top, observatory sketch courtesy of Purdue University Calumet; Middle, zero-g plane courtesy of ESA; Bottom, solar eclipse photographed by Luc Viatour, licenced under the GNU free documentation license.)

Water Found in Earth's Driest Place

Two US graduate students and their teammates on an expedition in the Atacama desert in Chile have made what could be an important discovery, with implications for future exploration on the moon and Mars.

Extensive research over the last decade by teams of scientists from NASA's Ames Research Center and other institutions has demonstrated that parts of the Atacama may be the driest place on the surface of the Earth -- their data show it's about 50 times drier than places like the Sahara desert or Death Valley in California, according to Chris McKay of Ames. (Some claim that the dry valleys of Antarctica may be even drier, but it's a difficult comparison to make since both areas receive so little moisture that it's hard to measure). There is literally no rainfall at all, not even fog, for years on end.

But now J. Judson Wynne (whom everyone knows as Jut) and his fellow PhD student Pete Polsgrove, who have been exploring caves in the Atacama, have found water deep inside two of these caves. And that might suggest the possibility of similar hidden spots on Mars where water, and possibly life, could be hiding.

I met Jut two years ago, out in the Atacama, when I was there with McKay and a team of scientists, along with a group of middle-school teachers who were there as part of a NASA education project. Jut, with biologist Penny Boston from New Mexico State University and others, was studying how to find caves using aerial infrared surveillance, as a way that could someday be applied to discovering caves on other worlds.

Jut is a cave research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the SETI Institute, and is also currently pursuing a Ph.D. in biological sciences (with an emphasis on regional biodiversity patterns of caves in the arid southwest) at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff. Polsgrove is also a student at NAU.

This new finding, which was first mentioned a few days ago online on LiveScience, could be an especially significant new discovery. I sent an email to Jut, who is still down there in the Atacama, asking for more details about his work and what he's found, and what its implications might be. This is what he had to say:

"I am essentially conducting two major research projects. One is my PhD dissertation, the other is this work. Please refer to my research page on my website for more information (www.caveexplorer.org). Myself and several colleagues developed the Earth-Mars Cave Detection Project back in 2004. This program was initially developed to systematically detect caves on Earth. Once the caves were identified, we could then inventory these features for significant biodiversity. A friend later suggested that we should do this for Mars as well, and the project was then developed. We are also very interested in applying our techniques to the Moon also. Please refer to my paper (http://caveexplorer.org/pdf/Wynne_etal_inpress.pdf) for more information.

This project is part of a three year program which will focus on studying and modeling cave thermal behavior and conducting aerial overflights of study caves in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile and the Mojave Desert, southern California. This project is administered by NASA-Ames and The SETI Institute and is funded by NASA´s Exobiology Program.

We still do not know whether the presence of water within Atacama caves is a unique occurrence. This is definitely an area of research that warrants further investigation.  We have discovered water/mud in two of the seven caves we are studying.

There are various mechanisms that may explain this. However, there is one unifying theme that ties all of these together -- a highly sheltered and protected environment. The passages within the caves that contain water are very warm, contain little to no airflow, and the dry stream bed containing the mud is heavily salt covered. Unfortunately, I do not want to go into too much detail regarding my hypotheses because we are planning to conduct some experiments and submit grants to support additional research on this topic.

With the recent discovery of salt on Mars by the Phoenix Lander, I foresee the potential for halophiles within caves to become another possibility for life. So, the observation of water within these caves may have significant implications.

The Atacama Desert expedition will end 12 August. Then, five of us will go to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for a seven day expedition (15-22 August). This will be centered upon conducting cave biodiversity surveys and mapping caves."

(Photos of Atacama caves: top, photo by Jut Wynne; second, photo of Jut Wynne inside a coastal cave near Antofagasta, Chile by David L. Chandler, copyright 2006; third, Atacama cave photo by Dan Ruby; bottom, Jut Wynne and Penny Boston prepare to rappel into an old mining pit in the Atacama, photo by David L. Chandler, copyright 2006)

Setback for SpaceX is Setback for Student Space Projects

SpaceX, short for Space Exploration Technologies, is one of the most interesting companies in the world right now to keep an eye on. If I were a billionaire -- and hey, I'm only a billion or so short of being one -- I would be pouring investment money into the company, and expecting a handsome return on it in a few years.
Yesterday, Space-X had their third launch failure in as many attempts. Or, as the company's founder Elon Musk prefers to describe it, their third "partial success." Ok, he has a point -- most of the innovative Falcon 1 rocket's parts worked perfectly. The first stage, using a brand-new rocket motor and structure and control system, worked without a hitch. But, for the second time, there was a problem with the separation between the first and second stages, and so the payload -- in this case, three separate satellites -- never made it to orbit.
Musk, who made his fortune in the Internet, by founding PayPal and then selling it to eBay, vows to keep on trying. In a letter posted on the SpaceX website, he declared flatly "There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport.  For my part, I will never give up and I mean never."
I admire Musk and his innovative plans, and I believe his commitment is real. And in addition to his personal fortune of a few hundred million, he says he has obtained substantial outside investment to keep the company's plans on track. And even NASA is backing him, as part of its COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) program to provide resupply services to the International Space Station.
Why does any of this matter to students? In fact, it matters in a big way, because SpaceX is one of about a half-dozen companies that are working hard to bring down the cost of sending things into orbit by at least an order of magnitude, and hopefully by two orders of magnitude, over the next few years. And if he or any of the others succeed (and frankly SpaceX is one of the top two or three candidates, and the one likeliest to succeed first), it will completely revolutionize the entire space business.
And among the very first people to benefit from that dramatic cost reduction will be students and academic researchers. A whole host of science and engineering research projects that would have been too costly to even attempt could suddenly open up as practical and within reach. And other projects that might have taken many years to get to the point of actually getting into orbit might be able to get there on a timescale of months instead. It will truly be a new era for university-based projects in astronomy, communications, materials research, biology in microgravity, and exploration.
In fact, Musk has specifically already offered cut-rate launch services to some of the student teams that are competing in the Google Lunar X-Prize challenge, including a team from Carnegie Mellon University.
So we should all be rooting very hard for SpaceX, as well as for the other companies competing in this arena: Blue Origin, founded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos; Xcor, a company based in Mojave, California that has the most explicit plans to make its planned low-cost launch services available for academic research; Armadillo Aerospace, founded by John Carmack, creator of the videogame Doom; and  Virgin Galactic, the partnership between X-Prize winner Burt Rutan and Virgin  Group founder Sir Richard Branson. While Virgin Galactic's business plan is mostly focused on the tourist market, it is clear that their vehicles -- both the SpaceShipTwo rocket, and its carrier plane White Knight Two -- could be a great platform for research as well.

Musk says that he has another Falcon 1 rocket ready to go, and he's also going full-tilt toward test flights of the much bigger Falcon 9, which will be the most powerful US rocket in existence. I wish him well, and will be keeping a close eye on his progress, and will keep you all posted on new developments here in this blog. (By the way, the best way to keep track of developments in real-time when there's a SpaceX launch about to take off is through a blog by Elon Musk's brother Kimbal, called Kwajalein Atoll and Rockets after the Pacific island site where the tests are conducted). There's also a good analysis of yesterday's failure, and of Musk's overall approach, on the blog Space Transport News.
Good luck to all of the new generation of space pioneers represented by these daring startup companies, that are poised to revolutionize the way the space business works.

(Photo: Falcon 1's second launch attempt from Kwajalein Atoll last year, courtesy of SpaceX)

To My Martian Readers

Today's post is a special message to my Martian readers.

No, you probably don't know who you are. But I'm willing to bet that at least one of you, reading this blog right now, will end up being among the first humans to spend time on the surface of Mars -- in other words, you are going to be one of the first Martians. At least, unless you want to count the microbes that I suspect are probably already living there. But I'll come back to that.

Current plans call for US astronauts to return to the moon about a decade from now -- about 50 years after the first human landings there, and about 45 years from the last time human feet walked there. China hopes to send its first astronauts (they call them "Taikonauts") to the moon somewhere around the same time. The European Space Agency, Japan, and others have talked about going there too.

And then, after people gain a bit more experience in staying alive a very long way from home, Mars is clearly the next destination people will be hankering for. In fact, some of us have had that hankering for a long time now.

So, maybe about 20 years from now -- maybe sooner, if people really start trying, maybe later if there are some setbacks -- the first humans will arrive on Mars. They'll probably stay for a few months, maybe even a year or two. And then there will be more. By 30 or 40 years from now, I'd be surprised if there isn't some kind of a permanently inhabited outpost there. No, I'm not talking colonies -- for a long time, it will be more like the research stations in Antarctica, I suspect, although in the longer term Mars has much better prospects than Antarctica, in fact than anyplace else in the solar system, to sustain self-supporting colonies.

So, people who are probably in college right now -- in other words, the people for whom I'm writing this blog -- will be among that first group of astronauts who make the initial landings on Mars, and somebody who is in college right now may well be among the very first permanent settlers there. Maybe it's you!

That's what I hope. And I hope that this blog, over the coming days, months and years, will be a valuable tool to help get you there. I aim to make this a useful resource full of tips about opportunities for doing research, field work and hands-on projects that will help to lay the groundwork for future space exploration -- and that will add the kind of cutting-edge work experiences to your resume that may help to get you into the astronaut corps, off into space, and on to other worlds.

So why do I keep talking about Mars all the time? No, it's not the only interesting place out there. I'm fascinated by the prospects for exploring Jupiter's moon Europa, which has a vast, global frozen-over ocean of liquid water, and quite possibly will turn out to be the first place where we will discover proof of an independently-evolved form of life -- which will be perhaps the most epochal discovery in the history of human science. I'm very interested in Saturn's moon Titan, the only other place in the solar system that presently has a cycle of evaporation and precipitation, with rivers and lakes on its surface (even if they are made of petrochemicals). And I know that landing on, exploring, and harnessing the resources of an asteroid may be the most practical near-term exploration goal for many reasons. But still, there's just noplace like Mars.

In a nutshell, it's the one place where humans stand a chance, perhaps within our lifetimes, of really setting up housekeeping. It has soil that can grow crops, air that could be concentrated and enhanced inside inflatable structures to support people, and abundant supplies of frozen water -- maybe even liquid water not far underground -- that can be harnessed for drinking, and split to make oxygen to breathe and hydrogen for fuel. In short, it's the only place where we stand a realistic shot at establishing something approaching self-sufficiency. It's almost certain to be the first real home-away-from-home for us inhabitants of Earth.

But let's get back to those microbes for a minute. Bugs on Mars are, in a way, one of the most compelling reasons for going there -- a place where we may learn things about the nature and history of life that we couldn't find anywhere else. But, if they exist, they are also the one thing that might seriously slow down our human exploration of the red planet.

I'm pretty sure microbes do live there, and that's a topic I've written about many times, and will continue to offer my thoughts on, including in this space (some examples here, here and here). In a nutshell: The Viking life-detection experiments in 1976 produced a series of results that met the criteria that all the scientists had agreed on as indicating a positive detection. Although many of the scientists on the team doubted that interpretation, and insisted the data were indicating some kind of exotic chemical reaction instead, the guy who actually designed and built the experiment that produced the most dramatic and compelling results, the Labeled Release (LR) test, Dr. Gilbert Levin, is quite convinced that the LR test really did provide strong evidence for the existence of living microbes on Mars right now.

And I think he's very likely right about that.

But it may take some time before it gets proved, one way or the other. There are no life detection tests on Phoenix, which is scraping away there now, or on any upcoming Mars mission in the next few years. But Phoenix does have a shot at completely demolishing the argument that the skeptics on the Viking team made to explain why the LR results shouldn't be seen as evidence for life.

The argument was that a separate instrument on Viking failed to detect any organic molecules. And no organics, no life. Case closed.

Except – recent tests have shown the Viking instrument could actually have missed huge amounts of organic material. And now, for the first time, we have a chance to find out. Maybe within the next few days, Phoenix could start detecting organics in the ice and frozen soil of Mars' polar region. And if it turns out there really are organics there, that throws the Viking results into a whole new light. Maybe we really did discover alien life 32 years ago, and it's just taking a while for people to accept it.

I can hardly wait to see those new results, and of course Levin is watching with great interest and anticipation.

So, why did I say that Martian life might slow down our exploration? Well, if there really are living microbes there now, that will become one of the most important subjects imaginable for biological research. If they turn out to be close relatives, made from regular DNA, as I suspect is the case – rocks have been hurtling back and  forth between the Earth and Mars for billions of years, and it would be sort of surprising if there hadn't been some cross-fertilization – then they may reveal important clues about our own origins. And if they're not related, then they could teach us fundamentally new things about the nature of life, and what is essential and what variations are possible.

So, the last thing we'd want to do is contaminate the whole planet and screw up that research. Any human missions would likely be delayed, or minimized, because it's virtually impossible to design vehicles and spacesuits that wouldn't spread bits of terrestrial biology in just the places where we'd want to be looking for the alien bits. It would slow things down, but it wouldn't stop us. I'm convinced that, in the long run, the human settlement of Mars is absolutely inevitable.

And you, reading this now, may be one of the first people to do it. A member of the first generation of sentient, tool-building, world-changing Martians. I certainly hope so. And I hope I can help in some small ways to get you there, by providing information, tips, and maybe a bit of inspiration.

When you get to Mars, maybe I'll be standing there next to you. I hope so. But if not, I hope you'll remember me and give me an interplanetary call. I'll be waiting.

Good luck to you, my future-Martian readers!

(Photos: College students in the Atacama desert, Chile, one of the most Mars-like places on Earth, doing research with a team of NASA scientists to help develop and interpret life-detection tests for Mars. Photos by me, David L. Chandler, copyright 2006)