"Ingenuity’s flight on Mars rings in a new era of aviation" PBS NewsHour 4/19/2021
Excerpt
SUMMARY: NASA has made plenty of history with space flights to Mars. But on Monday began a new chapter: It flew on Mars for the first time using an experimental helicopter, Ingenuity. Miles O'Brien takes us out of this world.
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SUMMARY: NASA has successfully landed [8th] its spacecraft InSight on Mars, after a long and challenging voyage. Scientists hope InSight will uncover details of what’s under the surface of Mars, including whether the planet’s core is liquid or solid. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien explains to Judy Woodruff why “there’s nothing easy about this” venture and how it might affect future space exploration.
SUMMARY: SpaceX launched the world’s most powerful rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday, a successful liftoff brought to fruition by Elon Musk’s private company. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien joins John Yang to discuss the historical launch and what made it so different from a NASA launch.
SUMMARY: CubeSat's, low-cost, bite-sized satellites inspired by the tubes used to hold Beanie Babies, were invented in 1999 as educational tools. Now, aerospace suppliers and governments across the globe see the tools as the future of space commercialization and deep space exploration.
SUMMARY: NASA has found evidence of liquid water on Mars. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the inevitable question: Does this mean there could be some form of life on the red planet?
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Finally tonight: big news from outer space.
NASA today announced that it has found evidence of liquid water on Mars, at least during certain seasons of the Martian year. The discovery was made through satellite images, which revealed darkly shaded streaks on slopes of craters and hillsides. They darken and lighten over time as water seeps across the surface, and then evaporates.
For more on what it all might mean, I’m joined by science correspondent Miles O’Brien.
Hello again.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): Judy, good to see you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, how do they know it’s water, Miles? They don’t — there hasn’t been a human there to look at it. They’re looking through satellites. What — how do they know?
MILES O’BRIEN: The HiRISE instrument, which is on the orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, is a very sophisticated instrument and has the ability to do spectral analysis.
So, it can actually look at how light moves through whatever is flowing there. And it gives unique signatures of water and in this case a lot of salt. It’s the salt that is the key here, because Mars is cold and has an atmosphere which is almost nonexistent. So, the idea of water flowing there is hard to imagine.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But this flies in the face of what scientists thought for a long time, or have they been building up to this?
MILES O’BRIEN: Well, there is a huge body of evidence that Mars at one time was warm and wet, and we think probably a cushy birth for life.
So, we have been looking for evidence of ancient life, fossils, for example. There has always been this thought that maybe the water is underneath in an aquifer. Could it somehow rise to the surface on certain occasions in certain ways? That’s been a big question.
They first spotted these streaks back in 2010. It sure looked like water. But what would keep it flowing? And the key was, they found these percolates, these salts in there. It’s extremely salty water. Think of why do — how do we get snow off our roads in the winter? We use salt.
On Tuesday, December 16, 2014, NASA scientists attending the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco announced the detection of organic compounds on Mars. The announcement represents the discovery of the missing “ingredient” that is necessary for the existence – past or present – of life on Mars.
Indeed, the extraordinary claim required extraordinary evidence – the famous assertion of Dr. Carl Sagan. The scientists, members of the Mars Science Lab – Curiosity Rover – mission, worked over a period of 20 months to sample and analyze Martian atmospheric and surface samples to arrive at their conclusions. The announcement stems from two separate detections of organics: 1) ten-fold spikes in atmospheric Methane levels, and 2) drill samples from a rock called Cumberland which included complex organic compounds.
Methane, of the simplest organic compounds, was detected using the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM). This is one of two compact laboratory instruments embedded inside the compact car-sized rover, Curiosity. Very soon after landing on Mars, the scientists began to use SAM to periodically measure the chemical content of the Martian atmosphere. Over many samples, the level of Methane was very low, ~0.9 parts per billion. However, that suddenly changed and, as scientists stated in the press conference, it was a “wow” moment that took them aback. Brief daily spikes in Methane levels averaging 7 parts per billion were detected.
The detection of methane at Mars has been claimed for decades, but more recently, in 2003 and 2004, independent research teams using sensitive spectrometers on Earth detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars. One group led by Vladimir Krasnopolsky of Catholic University, and another led by Dr. Michael Mumma from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, detected broad regional and temporal levels of Methane as high as 30 parts per billion. Those announcements met with considerable skepticism from the scientific community. And the first atmospheric measurements by Curiosity were negative. However, neither group backed down from their claims.
The sudden detection of ten-fold spikes in methane levels in Gale crater is not inconsistent with the earlier remote measurements from Earth. The high seasonal concentrations were in regions that do not include Gale Crater, and it remains possible that the Curiosity measurements are of a similar nature but due to some less active process than exists at the regions identified by Dr. Mumma’s team.
The NASA scientists at AGU led by MSL project scientist Dr. John Grotzinger emphasized that they do not yet know how the methane is being generated. The process could be biological or not. There are abiotic chemical processes that could produce methane. However, the MSL SAM detections were daily spikes and represent an active real on-going process on the red planet. This alone is a very exciting aspect of the detection.
The team presented slides to describe how methane could be generated. With the known low background levels of methane at ~ 1 part per billion, an external cosmic source, for example micro-meteoroids entering the atmosphere and releasing organics which is then reduced by sunlight to methane, could be ruled out. The methane source must be of local origin.
The scientists illustrated two means of production. In both instances, there is some daily – or at least periodic – activity that is releasing methane from the subsurface of Mars. The source could be biological which is accumulated in subsurface rocks then suddenly released. Or an abiotic chemistry, such as a reaction between the mineral olivine and water, could be the generator.
The subsurface storage mechanism of methane proposed and illustrated is called clathrate storage. Clathrate storage involves lattice compounds that can trap molecules such as methane which can subsequently be released by physical changes in the clathrate, such as solar heating or mechanical stresses. Through press Q&A, the NASA scientists stated that such clathrates could be preserved for millions and billions of years underground.
The second discovery of organics involved more complex compounds in surface materials. Also since arriving at Mars, Curiosity has utilized a drilling tool to probe the interiors of rocks. Grotzinger emphasized how material immediately at the surface of Mars has experienced the effects of radiation and the ubiquitous soil compound perchlorate reducing and destroying organics both now and over millions of years. The detection of no organics in loose and exposed surface material had not diminished NASA scientists’ hopes of detecting organics in the rocks of Mars.
Drilling was performed on several selected rocks and it was finally a mud rock called Cumberland that revealed the presence of organic compounds more complex than simple methane. The scientists did emphasize that what exactly these organic compounds are remains a mystery because of the confounding presence of the active chemical perchlorate which can quickly breakdown organics to simpler forms.
The detection of organics in the mud rock Cumberland required the drilling tool and also the scoop on the multifaceted robotic arm to deliver the sample into the SAM laboratory for analysis. To detect methane, SAM has an intake valve to receive atmospheric samples.
Dr. Grotzinger described how Cumberland was chosen as a sample source. The rock is called a mud stone which has undergone a process called digenesis – the metamorphosis of sediment to rock. Grotzinger emphasized that fluids will move through such rock during digenesis and perchlorate can destroy organics in the process. Such might be the case for many metamorphic rocks on the Martian surface. The panel of scientists showed a comparison between rock samples measured by SAM. Two in particular – from the rock “John Klein” and the Cumberland rock — were compared. The former showed no organics as well as other rocks that were sampled; but Cumberland’s drill sample from its interior did reveal organics.
Existing medical techniques are laying the foundations for an ambitious research project to send astronauts into a deep sleep on a six-month journey to Mars, according to the engineer leading the study.
"There's technology being used in the medical community that could support this - there's a wealth of data out there to support it," John Bradford, president of Atlanta-based SpaceWorks, told FoxNews.com. "It's a big step, but it could be adopted for space flight."
The NASA-funded study began 12 months ago, and conjures up images of science fiction - putting astronauts into a deep sleep, or torpor, during the long six-month journey to Mars.
“I don’t think that we could go to Mars without something like this technology,” Bradford said. Putting the crew into a deep sleep, he explained, would significantly reduce the amount of supplies and infrastructure needed to support the long space journey, from food to onboard living space.
The study predicts that putting a spacecraft’s crew into torpor, or stasis state, would cut the mission requirements from 400 tons to 220 tons of equipment and supplies.
Bradford told FoxNews.com that the torpor could be achieved by a technique called therapeutic hypothermia, which is already used in hospitals, albeit for a much shorter time period.
Therapeutic, or protective, hypothermia lowers a patient’s body temperature to reduce the risk of tissue injury following, say, a cardiac arrest when blood flow is limited.
In the thermal management system envisaged by SpaceWorks, a tube inserted into an astronaut’s nasal cavity will emit a cooled gas, lowering their temperature by about 10 degrees. Low-dose drugs will also be administered to suppress their shiver reflex and ease their passage into a deep sleep.
"Other than the duration, the procedural aspects of this are pretty benign," said Bradford.
Technologies are already commercially available in this area, such as the RhinoChill IntraNasal cooling system, which is used to induce therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest.
However, SpaceWorks acknowledges that there's a lot more research needed before someone is placed in a six-month sleep. Up to now, the longest torpor induced by therapeutic hypothermia is 14 days, according to Bradford.
The engineer told FoxNews.com that, while the research aims to wake astronauts just once, at the end of their journey, other sleep durations may be used. The crew, he explained, could sleep in shifts, with each astronaut in torpor for about two weeks and then conscious for two days, ensuring that one crew member is always awake during the mission.
While in stasis state, astronauts would be fed intravenously with an aqueous solution of carbohydrates, amino acids, dextrose, and lipids, according to Bradford. "They would not have any solid waste - it would be strictly urine," he said, noting that a catheter would be used to dispose of the liquid.
The medical industry is also developing technologies such as infection-resistant IV lines that could prove useful during the flight to Mars, Bradford said.
The crew could be brought out of their torpor by turning off the cooling gas and shivering suppressant. "Nominally, it would take about two hours to wake somebody," said the SpaceWorks president. "It would probably take a couple of days [for the astronauts] to get [fully] acclimated - our testing will include cognitive tests to examine their mental faculties when they wake up."
Bradford estimates that a typical Mars mission will involve a six month journey, followed by a year and a half on the red planet, and a six month journey back to earth.
While NASA has successfully completed unmanned missions to Mars, such as the Curiosity rover, putting humans on the planet is a much more challenging endeavor. NASA, for example, has a 2035 target for landing humans on Mars, although SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has predicted that people could be on Mars within 10 to 12 years.
SpaceWorks’ Bradford expects to see human Mars missions in 20 years, noting that the deep sleep research project is still in its infancy.
“There’s a ways to go,” he told FoxNews.com. “We have concluded the phase one effort, which is developing the initial design, the engineering details, and medical plausibility - we’re now looking at the next steps, which will be continued studies of the engineering challenges.”
Over the next five years, NASA and seven partner institutions will be taking on new projects to help paint a more complete picture about how life comes to be in the universe. The projects include preparing to bring back samples of the Martian terrain to Earth, investigating the role of comets and asteroids in delivering water and organic compounds around the solar system and researching how our own planet has managed to sustain life for so much of its history.
This week, NASA announced the winners of its seventh Cooperative Agreement Notice grant competition (CAN7), who will receive $50 million between them to conduct their research.
There are no plans to build a Starship Enterprise to hop from galaxy to galaxy in search of aliens among the projects, rather they will all take place here on Earth.
A team at the SETI Institute will be looking into the best ways to ensure that a planned 2020 NASA mission to bring back samples from Mars selects the ideal scoops of Maritan soil or rock and takes the best care of that precious cargo. Another project based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. will use natural hydrothermal chimney systems on our own planet as models to investigate how conditions on icy worlds such as Europa, Ganymede, and Enceladus might be able to support life.
A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder will examine the potential of how rocks might power life on planets such as Mars when their chemical energy is released through interaction with water. Others will look at how Earth’s history might hold key secrets to the search for E.T., like a University of California at Riverside project to examine the history of oxygen in our own atmosphere and oceans.
“The intellectual scope of astrobiology is vast, from understanding how our planet went from lifeless to living, to understanding how life has adapted to Earth’s harshest environments, to exploring other worlds with the most advanced technologies to search for signs of life,” said Mary Voytek, director of NASA’s astrobiology program.
Each project team will receive about $8 million and join five continuing astrobiology project teams already participating in the program at the University of Washington in Seattle; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now let’s turn to a space story that captured the world’s attention today, as India claims a triumph in its first mission to Mars.
Hari Sreenivasan has the story.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Cheers erupted at the Indian Space Research Organization on word that the satellite named Mangalyaan, or Mars craft, had swung into Mars orbit.
Journalist Pallava Bagla was at mission control in Bangalore, and spoke with us via Google Hangout.
PALLAVA BAGLA: When it emerged from behind Mars and 12 minutes later the signal came that the main rocket engine had its stopped firing, oh, my God, I have never seen such happy faces in India.
HARI SREENIVASAN: India joins the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and the European Union as the only ones to land a spacecraft on the Red Planet or place one in orbit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi:
NARENDRA MODI, Prime Minister, India: History has been created today. We have dared to reach out into the unknown and have achieved the near impossible.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The Indians pulled it off on the first try for just $75 million, less than it cost to make “Gravity,” the Oscar-winning blockbuster movie. But there have been debates over whether the money could be better spent in a country where millions live in wrenching poverty.
BRINDA ADIGE, Director, Global Concerns India: At one end of the spectrum, so much of money that is being spent to send a rocket out into outer space, when we know that here on Earth, in my country, there are children dying every day because they have no food to eat.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Still, the success in space proved inspirational for many, including schoolchildren who arrived in class early to watch the TV coverage.
STUDENT: It is a very big achievement for India. I mean, we are feeling very proud to be Indians, proud to be born in a country who can do anything.
HARI SREENIVASAN: India’s satellite followed close behind the U.S. MAVEN orbiter, which arrived at Mars on Sunday.
BRUCE JAKOSKY, Principal Investigator, MAVEN: We are on orbit of Mars, guys.
(LAUGHTER)
BRUCE JAKOSKY: And we have taken 11 years to get here, and now we get to do the science that we have been planning for all this time.
HARI SREENIVASAN: MAVEN cost nearly 10 times that of India’s satellite, but their missions are similar, to examine how the planet went from warm and wet to cold and dry.
SUMMARY: India’s successful first mission to Mars is a major accomplishment for that nation, in both scientific and budgetary terms. To understand the historic feat, India’s space program and where it fits into the American exploration of Mars, science correspondent Miles O’Brien joins Hari Sreenivasan.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Later tonight the NASA MAVEN spacecraft is expected to complete a 10-month voyage to Mars.
Once it’s placed into orbit, NASA scientists plan to gather information about the red planet’s atmosphere — information they hope will offer clues about our own planet’s climate. For more on the mission significance, yesterday I spoke with the NewsHour’s Miles O’Brien.
Why are space nuts, Mars nerds, all so excited for Sunday night?
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): Well this is all part of the big tapestry, if you will, of laying the ground work for one day putting human boots on Mars — we hope. You just don’t fly off in a rocket and land there. You need to learn about the soil, the ground.
And in this case, the atmosphere. One of the big questions, the overriding questions, which trouble scientists and which has a lot to do about future exploration of Mars, is, what happened to the planet over the past 3 billion years?
It used to be warm and wet and now it’s awfully dry and awfully cold. What happened along the way? Understanding what’s going on in the fringes of the atmosphere, which is what MAVEN will do, will help scientists understand what happened.
Did the solar wind kind of blow the atmosphere away? Was that a part of what happened to this planet as it went through kind of the ultimate climate change.
Robotic rover Curiosity has reportedly taken a data sample of a Martian soil that could potentially change the perception of man about the red planet forever.
According to a latest report by CNET correspondent Erik Mack, the people at NASA are trying to keep something earth-shattering at least for several weeks until they are able to verify the sample.
NASA is starting to receive significant information from the mobile chemistry lab mounded on Curiosity. SAM or sample analysis at Mars has been reading really important facts about the components of the Martian soil.
NPR science correspondent Joe Palca said the people at NASA, especially Curiosity mission lead scientist John Grotzinger, are crossing their fingers that it is really a breakthrough finding on Mars.
“This data is going to be one for the history books, it’s looking really good,” Grotzinger said in the story that aired yesterday, according CNET.
Asked on the reason behind their decision to keep the findings a secret for now, Grotzinger said NASA needs to make sure that the data was not erroneous.
Lewiss Dartnell, a leading astrobiologist at the Center for Planetary Science at UCL/Birkbeck in London, said scientists not associated with NASA also have less information regarding the current discovery on the red planet. Dartnell added there is likely no option for now but to wait for NASA’s announcement.
“The SAM instrument is designed to detect organic molecules on Mars, so the smart money is on an announcement along those lines.”
Even NASA’s much awaited revelation could be months away from today, people are now starting to debate over a never ending issue on whether there’s really life on Mars.
In fact, CNET reporter Mack is already thinking of human colony on Mars with condominiums or maybe a five-star resort.
“The seas may be rising and more superstorms may continue to threaten humanity’s most important megalopolises, but there could soon be an emerging market for condominiums on Mars to take our minds off of such challenges,“ said Mack.
In the first inventory of minerals on another planet, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity found soil that bears a striking resemblance to weathered, volcanic sand in Hawaii, scientists said on Tuesday.
The rover uses an X-ray imager to reveal the atomic structures of crystals in the Martian soil, the first time the technology, known as X-ray diffraction, has been used to analyze soil beyond Earth.
"This was a 22-year journey and a magical moment for me," NASA's David Blake, lead scientist for the rover's mineralogical instrument, told reporters during a conference call.
Curiosity found the Martian sand grains have crystals similar to basaltic soils found in volcanic regions on Earth, like Hawaii.
Scientists plan to use the information about Mars' minerals to figure out if the planet most like Earth in the solar system could have supported and preserved microbial life.
"The mineralogy of Mars' soil has been a source of conjecture until now," said Curiosity scientist David Vaniman of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
"This interest isn't just academic," he added. "Soils on planets' surfaces are a reflection of surface exposure processes and history, with information on present and past climates."
Specifically, scientists want to understand what conditions existed to allow the particular minerals to form. The first Martian soil scoop is mineralogically similar to basaltic materials and comprised primarily of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine.
About half the soil is non-crystalline materials, like volcanic glass, that form from the breakdown of rocks.
Several processes can account for this weathering, including interaction with water or oxygen, similar to how rust forms on iron-metal surfaces.
Brute force, such as sandstorms or meteorite impacts, also could account for the soil's weathered components, said chemist Douglas Ming of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The Curiosity rover landed inside a giant impact crater near the Martian equator in August for a two-year, $2.5-billion mission, NASA's first astrobiology expedition since the 1970s-era Viking probes.
The rover is scouting a site where three types of rock intersect. Next year, scientists plan to drive it over to a three-mile (5-km) mound of sediment, named Mount Sharp, rising from the floor of the crater.
"We're hopeful that once we get into the truly ancient materials on Mount Sharp, we will find minerals that suggest there was a habitable environment of some kind there. We haven't had that happen yet, but we have a lot of time left," Blake said.
While X-ray diffraction has been around for a century, using the technology on Mars required years of work to scale down refrigerator-sized equipment into something that would fit into the space of a shoe box.
The miniaturized, low-power instrument is used in the mining, oil and gas industries and is being evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to screen for counterfeit pharmaceuticals.
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| If all goes according to plan, the first Mars One astronauts will touch down on the Red Planet in 2023 |
Humanity has long dreamed of putting boots on Mars, but those boots have the potential to stomp all over any lifeforms that may exist on the Red Planet.
A seething, swarming mass of 100 trillion microbes will accompany every astronaut who lands on Mars. This diverse "microbiome" has evolved with humans for eons and provides a number of services, from helping people digest their food to keeping pathogenic bacteria at bay.
While these microbes are intimately tied to humans, many of them will jump ship if transported to the Martian surface — with unknown consequences for a planet that may or may not host life of its own.
"We have the responsibility to Mars, I think — even if it's just Martian microbes — not to kill them by the act of detecting them," Cynthia Phillips of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute said at the SETICon 2 meeting in June in Santa Clara, Calif.
"If you have human astronauts there," Phillips added, "there's no way to sterilize them. They're spewing out thousands of microbes every second. So it's a real problem."
Location, location, location
Space agencies around the world are already thinking about ways to minimize the contamination risks posed by manned Mars missions, even though the first footsteps on the Red Planet are perhaps decades away.
In fact, they already have a set of guidelines to follow — a rough protocol drawn up in 2008 by the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), which is part of the International Council for Science. The top priority of the COSPAR policy is to protect Earth from any possible "back contamination" from Mars, but it aims to help protect the Red Planet from Earth life as well.
The COSPAR guidelines — which NASA and the European Space Agency, among others, are committed to follow — advise steering clear of gullies, possible geothermal sites and other "special regions" on the Red Planet where Earth life might be able to survive and proliferate.
"It is understood that when humans go to Mars, there will be a release of microbes from the human habitats and from the humans themselves, and also that humans will inevitably be exposed to Mars materials," said Cassie Conley, NASA's planetary protection officer.
"So the humans are only able to go to places where we expect that the Mars environment will be quite lethal to any Earth organisms that get released," Conley told SPACE.com, adding that various locations near the Martian equator might qualify.
The COSPAR guidelines further stipulate that humans cannot explore a Martian locale that has not been visited and vetted by a robot first. This robotic scout could arrive on a precursor mission, or it may be a component of the human mission itself.
No numbers yet
COSPAR's guidelines dictate just how clean robotic explorers of Mars and other alien worlds need to be. For example, NASA's Curiosity rover — which landed on Mars Aug. 5 to determine whether the planet has ever been capable of supporting microbial life — was allowed to carry a total of no more than 300,000 bacterial spores on any surface that could allow transfer to the Martian environment.
Such numerical targets don't exist yet for manned missions, but they probably will someday, Conley said.
"I'm sure that we will have more numerical information in the future, but partly we need to base that on our understanding of what kinds of hardware might be going," Conley said. "We also need to have a better understanding of the Mars environment itself."
Curiosity's two-year mission should be a big help in this latter regard, Conley added. The rover is studying its Gale Crater landing site with 10 science instruments, including gear designed to detect underground water ice and another tool that measures high-energy radiation at the planet's surface.
A Mars sample-return mission also would be a highly desirable precursor, Conley said. And this is indeed a key priority for NASA, which is evaluating several different strategies for getting pristine pieces of Mars into scientists' hands on Earth.
The space agency may reveal its chosen sample-return path in February, after the White House releases its federal budget request for fiscal year 2014, officials have said.
Private companies playing by the rules
NASA is thinking very seriously about how to send humans to Mars safely and responsibly, having been charged by President Barack Obama in 2010 to get astronauts to the vicinity of the Red Planet by the mid-2030s.
But government space agencies aren't the only entities planning out manned Mars missions. Elon Musk, founder and CEO of the private spaceflight firm SpaceX, has said he hopes to fly astronauts to the Red Planet within 10 or 15 years.
And the Dutch company Mars One aims to land four people on Mars in 2023, as the first step toward establishing a permanent colony. Mars One plans to pay for its ambitious activities by staging a reality-show media event around them — a sort of interplanetary "Big Brother."
Conley said such private efforts are likely to follow the COSPAR guidelines, too. Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, countries are responsible for the space activities of companies registered within their borders, so the U.S. and Dutch governments have a strong interest in making sure SpaceX and Mars One play by the rules.
After all, neither nation would want to be taken to international court on charges of contaminating another planet.
And the companies may want to do the right thing anyway. For example, SpaceX has already initiated planetary protection discussions with NASA regarding its manned Mars ambitions, Conley said.
"It's the environmentally responsible thing to do," Conley said. "If you want to be a good citizen of the solar system, you do the planetary protection requirements, just like you pick up the litter and you don't spread your pollution all over the countryside."
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| Tracks from the first drives of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity are visible in this image captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The rover is seen where the tracks end. The image's color has been enhanced to show the surface details better.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)
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NASA's newest Mars rover Curiosity is taking its first tentative drives across the Martian surface and leaving tracks that have been spotted all the way from space in a spectacular photo snapped by an orbiting spacecraft.
The new view of Curiosity's tracks from space was captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and released Thursday. It shows the rover as a bright, boxy vehicle at the end of two tracks that create a single zig-zag pattern in the Martian surface.
Another photo from the MRO spacecraft spotted the car-size Curiosity rover's parachute and protective backshell, which were jettisoned by the rover during its Aug. 5 landing. A previous photo by MRO taken on Curiosity's actual landing day captured an image of the Mars rover hanging from its parachute.
Scientists used the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, camera on the MRO spacecraft to take the new photos, which have created a buzz among the Curiosity rover's science team.
"The HiRISE camera on MRO continues to take amazing photographs of Mars, and of us on Mars," said Mike Watkins, Curiosity mission manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a briefing Thursday.
The photo of Curiosity also includes the rover's landing spot and shows the scorch marks left behind by the rockets on the sky crane that lowered the rover to the Martian surface.
"It's a great image of where we stand relative to the touchdown point now," Watkins said.
This isn't the first time the MRO spacecraft has captured views of rovers on Mars. The orbiter repeatedly observed NASA's smaller Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity as they explored the Martian surface following their own landings in January 2004. The Spirit rover's mission was declared over last year, but Opportunity continues to rover across the Martian plains of Meridiani Planum.
The Mars rover Curiosity took its first drive on Mars on Aug. 22 and completed its longest drive, a 100-foot (30.5 meter) trek, on Tuesday (Sept. 4). So far, the rover has driven a total of 358 feet (109 meters) on Mars, but is actually just 69 feet (82 meters) away from its landing site due to the turns the rover has performed along the way.
Mission scientists have also tested the rover's mast-mounted cameras and laser, which is used to study the composition of Martian rocks, and are preparing a weeklong set of tests to calibrate Curiosity's instrument-tipped robotic arm.
NASA's $2.5 billion Curiosity rover is designed to spend the next two years exploring the vast Gale Crater on Mars to determine if the area could have once supported microbial life. Mission scientists also plan to send the rover up Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer) mountain rising up from the center of the crater.
Bruno Mars move over. will.i.am has got a new single coming direct from Mars, the first-ever song to debut on another planet.
The Mars Curiosity mission has something for everyone: Cool pix, lasers blasting rocks, and now the music of the spheres.
"Reaching for the Stars" will be broadcast from the red planet at 4 p.m. EDT Tuesday.
The broadcast will be part of a NASA educational event for students at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.
According to NASA, members of the team that successfully landed the rover on Mars earlier this month will explain to students the mission and the technology behind the song's interplanetary transmission. will.i.am will then premiere "Reach for the Stars," a new composition about the singer's passion for science, technology, and space exploration.
will.i.am's i.am.angel Foundation, in partnership with Discovery Education of Silver Spring, Md., a provider of digital resources to kindergarten through grade 12 classrooms, will announce a new science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics initiative featuring NASA assets such as the Mars Curiosity Rover.
The event will be streamed on the agency's website and broadcast on NASA TV.
will.i.am is a big NASA fan and has appeared in a NASA promotional video explaining how NASA technologies have helped increase production of clean water, provide remote medical care and solar electricity for refrigeration, and keep food fresh during its trip from field to market.
While will.i.am has the first song, the honor of the first human voice to be broadcast from another planet was reserved for NASA administrator Charlie Bolden.
Here's Mr. Bolden's message:
Hello. This is Charlie Bolden, NASA Administrator, speaking to you via the broadcast capabilities of the Curiosity Rover, which is now on the surface of Mars.
Since the beginning of time, humankind’s curiosity has led us to constantly seek new life…new possibilities just beyond the horizon. I want to congratulate the men and women of our NASA family as well as our commercial and government partners around the world, for taking us a step beyond, to Mars.
This is an extraordinary achievement. Landing a rover on Mars is not easy – others have tried – only America has fully succeeded. The investment we are making…the knowledge we hope to gain from our observation and analysis of Gale Crater, will tell us much about the possibility of life on Mars as well as the past and future possibilities for our own planet. Curiosity will bring benefits to Earth and inspire a new generation of scientists and explorers, as it prepares the way for a human mission in the not-too-distant future.
Thank you.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has beamed home the first human voice ever sent from another planet, as well as some spectacular new images of its Martian environs.
The 1-ton Curiosity rover broadcast a pre-loaded greeting from NASA administrator Charlie Bolden, who congratulated the mission team for getting the huge robot to Mars safely. While the significance of the audio accomplishment is largely symbolic, NASA officials hope it presages a more substantial human presence on the Red Planet down the road.
"With this, we have another small step that's being taken in extending the human presence beyond Earth, and actually bringing that experience of exploring the planets back a little closer to all of us," said Curiosity program executive Dave Lavery, invoking the famous line late astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered from the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969.
"As Curiosity continues her mission, we hope the words of the administrator will be an inspiration to someone who's alive today, who will become the first to stand upon the surface of the planet Mars," Lavery told reporters Monday. "Like the great Neil Armstrong, they'll be able to speak aloud — in first person at that point — of the next giant leap in human exploration."
The mission team also unveiled today a stunning 360-degree panorama of Curiosity's Gale Crater landing site, showing in crisp detail some of the landforms scientists want the six-wheeled robot to explore. [Video: Curiosity's Martian Panorama]
Searching for habitable environments
Curiosity touched down inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5, tasked with determining whether the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life.
For the next two years, Curiosity is slated to explore Gale and the crater's 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) central peak, the mysterious Mount Sharp. The $2.5 billion rover is outfitted with 10 different science instruments to aid its quest, including a rock-zapping laser and gear that can identify organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.
Curiosity's ultimate destination is the base of Mount Sharp, where Mars-orbiting spacecraft have spotted signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water. These interesting deposits lie about 6 miles (10 km) from the rover's landing site as the crow flies.
The new 360-degree panorama, which is composed of 140 images snapped by Curiosity on Aug. 8 and Aug. 18, shows Mount Sharp's many-layered foothills, as well as its upper reaches stretching into a brown-tinged Martian sky. [Gallery: Photos from Curiosity's 4th Week on Mars]
The mosaic has Curiosity's scientists licking their chops.
"I think when those of us on the science team looked at this image for the first time, you get the feeling, 'That's what I'm talking about,'" said Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, a geologist at Caltech in Pasadena. "That is why we picked this landing site."
While researchers are most excited about the potential discoveries that await them on Mount Sharp's flanks, the scenic beauty captured in the panorama got their hearts racing, too, Grotzinger said.
The terrain "looks like it was something that comes out of a John Ford movie," he said.
A year away?
Though Curiosity took its first short test drive last week, it still hasn't strayed far from its landing site, which the mission team dubbed "Bradbury Landing" in honor of the late scifi author Ray Bradbury.
The rover should be ready to head out in a few days, Grotzinger said — but Curiosity won't be going straight to Mount Sharp. Rather, the first stop is Glenelg, a site 1,300 feet (400 meters) away where three different types of terrain come together in one place.
It'll likely take the rover a month or two to reach Glenelg, where it will spend another large chunk of time performing science operations. Curiosity could be ready to turn its wheels toward Mount Sharp by the end of the year, Grotzinger has said.
But it'll take Curiosity a while to reach the mountain. The rover will probably cover a maximum of about 330 feet (100 m) per day after it's fully checked out, researchers have said. And it may stop along the way to Mount Sharp to study interesting landforms.
"It'll probably take us a year to get there," Grotzinger said.
Also today, Curiosity scientists announced that tests of the rover's onboard chemistry laboratory, SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars), are going well. SAM can detect organics in Martian soil, and it will sniff the Red Planet's atmosphere for methane, which may be a sign of life as organisms here on Earth are known to generate the gas.
The SAM tests are part of an ongoing checkout of Curiosity and its science instruments, which has proceeded very smoothly so far.
"Curiosity, as you've gathered by now, is a very complicated beast with lots of parts, and the project's being very systematic about testing things out," said SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
"We think of ourselves a little bit as the nose of Curiosity, and we're getting ready to start sniffing," Mahaffy added.
It was a modest test drive; moving forward 15 feet, turning in place 120 degrees, then backing up about 8 feet. The entire trip took about 16 minutes, with most of the time spent stopped as cameras took photographs of the progress.
But for the team behind Curiosity, the six-wheeled NASA rover that landed on Mars 17 days ago, the first tracks in the dust on Wednesday were an exciting milestone.
“It couldn’t be more important,” Peter C. Theisinger, the mission’s project manager, said at a post-drive news conference. “I mean, we built a rover. So unless the rover roves, we really haven’t accomplished anything.”
Curiosity is to spend at least a couple of years roving through a 96-mile-wide crater and up a 3.4-mile-high mountain at the center of the crater, exploring for signs that early Mars could have been habitable for microbial life.
But that journey of miles started with a roll of a few feet away from Bradbury Landing, where Curiosity set down on Aug. 6. NASA said on Wednesday that the spot had been named for Ray Bradbury, the author of “The Martian Chronicles” and other influential science-fiction novels, who died in June. He would have turned 92 on Wednesday.
Recently, Curiosity has been busy with other exercises, like vaporizing Martian rocks and seeing what they are made of (basalt, apparently, or something similar). On Sunday, the rover fired a laser instrument for the first time, hitting a rock with 30 bursts in 10 seconds and analyzing the atomic makeup from the resulting flashes of light.
On Monday, it flexed its arm. On Tuesday, it wiggled its four corner wheels in preparation for the drive.
“Everything has been going extremely well,” Mr. Theisinger said. “Really extremely well.”
Having succeeded at rock-zapping on Sunday, scientists turned the laser, which was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to vaporize small bits at six more locations. So far, most of the rocks appear to be a type, common on Mars, that forms from the rapid cooling of lava.
Another instrument, provided by Russia, has started firing neutrons into the soil to look for hydrogen, which would point to the presence of water. The rover has also gradually started science observations.
So far, the only broken piece has been a wind sensor that may have been knocked out by rocks kicked up during the landing, NASA said. A second wind sensor is working properly, as is the rest of the rover’s weather station, which was contributed by Spain.
The station has measured swings in air temperature from minus-103 degrees to 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Swings in ground temperatures have been even greater, from minus-132 degrees to 37 degrees.
During the next week, as more instruments are checked out, Curiosity may conduct its first analysis of the makeup of the Martian atmosphere. When that is complete, it is to head to its first destination, called Glenelg, where three types of terrain appear to intersect.
At first, Curiosity will move only about 30 feet at a time. As its engineers gain experience, the drives will stretch to longer than the length of a football field, relying on the rover’s ability to navigate for itself.
Mr. Theisinger, the project manager, cautioned that the early successes did not ensure future ones; so far, the mission has checked off only two of its primary goals, to launch on time and to land on Mars.
“We’ve got a long way to go before this mission meets its full potential,” he said. “But the fact we haven’t had any early problem is, in fact, fantastic.”
Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, stuck its extraordinary landing Sunday night in triumphant and flawless fashion, and is poised to begin its pioneering, two-year hunt for the building blocks of life — signs that Earth's creatures may not be not alone in the universe.
NASA's $2.5-billion mission involved the work of more than 5,000 people from 37 states, some of whom had labored for 10 years to hear the two words that Al Chen, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, said inside mission control at 10:32 p.m.: “Touchdown confirmed.”
Chen reported that Curiosity was in a “nice flat place,” and as icing on the cake, the spacecraft sent home thumbnail photographs of itself. Officials had said earlier in the day that photographs were possible but unlikely. Curiosity responded by immediately delivering a series of images, one showing one of its wheels resting comfortably on the floor of an ancient crater.
Inside mission control, engineers who had been chewing the insides of their cheeks and bouncing their legs nervously leapt to their feet, embracing, high-fiving and, in some cases, weeping with joy. “Yes!” one engineer cried, pumping his fist. “We did it again!” another shouted.
The striking success of the mission turned some steeped in hard science back into dreamers. JPL Director Charles Elachi said he walked outside mission control about an hour and a half before landing and stared up at Mars. “You are going to have a visitor,” Elachi said he whispered. “And the planet smiled,” Elachi said. “That's when I knew.”
Curiosity is expected to revolutionize deep-space science, not only searching for indications that Mars is or was habitable, but paving the way for the next critical steps in exploration — soil-sample returns, sending astronauts to Mars, even, perhaps, colonization.
“It's an extraordinary step forward in planetary exploration,” said John Holdren, President Obama's science and technology advisor. “Nobody has ever done anything like this.” Anyone questioning the United States' commitment to science and ambition should consider the “one-ton, automobile-sized piece of American ingenuity” that is now on Mars, Holdren said.
It had been a long and tense day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the mission for NASA.
As scientists' ambitions for Curiosity had grown in recent years, so had their spacecraft. This would not be a replay of the smaller rovers of the past -- which had, themselves, delivered extraordinary science and pretty firm evidence that rivers once coursed across the surface of Mars.
This would be a full-fledged geochemistry lab, on wheels, able to vaporize rocks, “taste” air samples and ingest dirt, then send the results of experiments home from 154 million miles away.
Curiosity's size required engineers to devise an entirely new landing sequence. Thousands of carefully calibrated and experimental devices -- which could never be vetted on Earth because Mars' atmosphere is so different -- had to work in precise lockstep for the spacecraft to survive.
The landing sequence, which NASA had dubbed “seven minutes of terror,” required the largest supersonic parachute ever deployed in space, a perilous-looking “sky crane” and 76 pyrotechnic explosions. If any one of those “pyros” had not occurred, “we die,” said Adam Steltzner, a leader of the landing team. Officials had spent much of the day Sunday speculating about how Curiosity might fail, and what the consequences might be for America's space program.
“I was really on pins and needles,” said NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. He called it a “huge day for the American people.”
“Everybody in the morning should be sticking their chest out saying: ‘That's my rover on Mars,'” Bolden said.
The primary mission is expected to last for at least one Martian year, or 687 Earth days.
Previous NASA missions have found evidence that Mars, now a cold and dry planet, had a warmer, watery past, so much so that scientists think of it as Earth's space cousin. Every environment on Earth that contains liquid water also sustains life. Curiosity will search for the other building blocks of life, particularly carbon-carrying organic molecules.
“Mars looks like it has been habitable,” said Michael Meyer, a leader of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. “But you need to go and look.... And Curiosity is the rover that is able to do that.”
Other than the decision to send the robot to Mars in the first place, the choice of a landing site was probably the most important issue scientists faced.
For five years, space scientists made impassioned arguments for their favored site.
Last summer, from a pool of 60 candidates, NASA and JPL decided to send Curiosity to Gale Crater, an ancient geological feature just south of the equator, caused when a meteor slammed into Mars 3 billion years ago.
Gale Crater won out largely because of an enormous mountain in its center. Dubbed Mt. Sharp in honor of noted Caltech geologist Robert Phillip Sharp, the mountain is three miles high. That's taller than any mountain in the “lower 48” of the United States, and taller than some portions of the rim of the crater that encircles the mound.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite that launched in 2005, has found that the mountain's slopes contain distinct layers -- clay at the bottom, an apparent remnant of Mars's watery past, a layer of sulfates on top of that, and layers of sand and dust toward the top.
Similar to the way the walls of the Grand Canyon offer a layered view of the evolution of North America, space scientists believe Mt. Sharp's slopes contain a preserved record of Mars's past.
Caltech's John Grotzinger, Curiosity's principal investigator, said the rover “will have started the era of a whole new dimension of space exploration.” That dimension, he said, is one of “deep time.”
Rather than getting a snapshot of one point in time on Mars, the mountain will allow Curiosity to build an understanding of “hundreds of millions to even billions of years,” Grotzinger said this weekend as JPL ramped up for landing.
Curiosity will climb the lower portion of the mountain to investigate the makeup of the layers of soil.
Even robots like to have fun. NASA's rover on Mars showed off its playful side by snapping a picture of its own shadow. It's the latest self-portrait since the rover, named Opportunity, landed on the red planet in 2004.
The photo was taken in March and NASA released it this week. The solar-powered, six-wheel rover was at an outcrop on the rim of a massive crater. The late afternoon sun set the crater aglow and Opportunity waited for just the right lighting to send a postcard back to Earth.
The result was a dramatic view of Opportunity casting a shadow with the crater in the background.
After nearly five months in one spot, the tireless rover is rolling again to explore more rocks.
Its twin, Spirit, stopped communicating in 2010.
