Barbylon

LRO Locates Lunokhod 1 Rover and its Laser Retroflector

2010-05-06T13:42:00.001-06:00

The first successful robotic lunar rover, Lunokhod 1, landed on 17 November 1970. For the next ten months the rover was driven by operators in the Soviet Union, with the total distance traveled exceeding 10 km. A French-built laser reflector was aboard rover, but after Lunakhod 1 fell silent on September 14, 1971, the location of the rover and retroreflector was unknown.

Laser retroreflectors are used by ground-based telescopes to pulse of laser light to the Moon and back. The time for the return tells the position of the retroreflector to less than a centimeter. This allows scientist to measure the shape or the moon as it bulges due to tides, the wobble of the Moon as it rotates on its axis, and the motion of the of Moon on its orbit to within an accuracy of one millimeter, or about the thickness of a paperclip. Three reflectors are required to lock down the orientation of the moon – the retroreflectors left by the Apollo 11, 14, and 15 missions are still routinely used for these measurements. Additional retroreflectors would allow determination of different lunar parameters and enable grater precision. Occasionally the Soviet Lunokhod 2 reflector has been used for this information, though it is severely degraded relative to the Apollo reflectors.

Ground-based observers had occasionally looked for the Lunokhod 1 reflector over the last two years, but faced tall odds against finding it until recently. The breakthrough came last month when the high-resolution camera on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, obtained images of the landing site. The camera team, led by Mark Robinson at Arizona State University, identified the rover as a sunlit speck on the image (see below) —miles from where teams had been searching. On April 22, Tom Murphy at UCSD and his team used the 3.5 meter telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to find the long lost Lunokhod 1 reflector and pinpoint its location to 10 meters on the surface and 2 cm distance from the earth. Finding the Lunokhod 1 allows for much better geodynamics and studies of the lunar interior.

Perigee Moon & Mars at Opposition

2010-02-16T14:30:00.002-07:00

The last weekend of January 2010 promised two very special "close encounters" with our nearest neighbors. Planetary scientist Barbara Cohen at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center answered your questions online about Mars at Opposition and the "largest" full moon of the year via a live Web chat on Friday, January 29, 2010 for over 90 minutes. http://www.nasa.gov/connect/chat/marsmoon_chat.html

Here's the transcript. Enjoy!

(Moderator) Brooke: This is a moderated chat. If you haven't seen your question answered yet, please wait a moment as it is in the queue to be answered. Many thanks for your patience.

Barbara: Hi everyone. Tonight is a special night because there's a full moon and Mars is near Opposition.

Omnologos: Given the extraordinary success of Spirit and Opportunity why don't we just build and send more of them to explore more of the Mars surface?

Barbara: Every mission we send builds on the others. We have new science questions even as we learn from Spirit and opportunity. Our next mission Curiosity (Mars Science Laboratory) will have more instruments and be able to roam further.

Erin: Is there science or observations that can be done at an Opposition that can't be done during other times?

Barbara: At opposition, Mars is very bright, so you can see it with your own telescope, so you can observe it. We learn more about the planet's orbit.

TelescopPeMater55: Hello, I tried to look at mars with my telescope and I don't know how much magnification I need to see it can you tell me how much I need?

Barbara: You can see Mars with your naked eye. It's small, reddish-orange, and doesn't twinkle. If you have binoculars, you can see a disk. If you have a larger telescope, you might be able to see bright polar caps and dark dust.

Goody: How often do we have a perigee moon?

Barbara: About once a year. But it doesn't always exactly coincide with a full moon.

Michael_C.: Why doesn’t Mars “twinkle” like Sirius? Thank you.

Barbara: Because the planets are very close relative to stars. The light they give comes from a disk, so the light doesn't "twinkle."

(Moderator) Brooke: We're working on answering your questions right now. If you haven't seen your question answered yet, please wait a moment as it is in the queue to be answered. Many thanks for your patience.

Gabrielle: Is there a way to see it online, since it's very overcast where I live?

Barbara: There will be lot of amateur photos online.

gayle: Hi, I'm a student at an elementary school in Tampa. I was wondering why, if we knew that Mars would be so close to the moon tonight, didn't we schedule a trip to Mars when it wouldn't take so long to get there?

Barbara: Great question! We DO schedule Mars launches so they take advantage of when the Earth and Mars are close to each other. But it takes six months to get to Mars, so we have to launch six months in advance of when they line up together.

omnologos: The Moon is quite close indeed compared to Mars. If Ares is cancelled, can we expect at least some rovers to explore the more interesting bits we have only looked at from orbit?

Barbara: Curiosity (Mars Science Lab) is a rover the size of a VW. We're launching it in 2011, and it will explore more of Mars from the ground.

Erin: What do you learn about a planet's orbit from it coming closer during the Opposition?

Barbara: Planets orbits aren’t exactly circular. They're influenced by many objects: the Sun, its own moons, Jupiter, etc. It doesn't come closer during Opposition, but it's a special time when it's on the opposite side of the Earth as the Sun.

earthvisitor: Where will Mars be located in the sky in relation to the moon?

Barbara: Very near the moon. Looking at the moon with the naked eye, Mars will be within a "fist" of the moon tonight (Friday).

WIstormspotter: With spirit now stationary, is there a plan if while doing stationary exploration that it gets dislodged to start up and move again?

Barbara: No, Spirit is going to remain motionless during Martian winter because there's not enough solar power. In Martian spring, we may try to start moving it again.

Erin: Does the increased brightness of Mars at Opposition help observations from the large, professional observing telescopes?

Barbara: Yes, it does.

dwscott: What's the typical time gap between concept for a probe/rover and the time it lands on Mars? How far into that gap can the instrument(s) be modified to conduct an investigation inspired by results from existing probes/rovers?

Barbara: From concept to landing, it takes many years. :)

goody: How often does the moon and mars both have close encounters with the earth?

Barbara: The moon and Mars are both in elliptical orbits. The moon comes closest at a time called perigee, which happens once a month. For Mars, it gets to its closest point to the sun every two years.

Michael_C.: Is there a website similar to http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings that provides sighting information for “natural” objects in the sky such as Mars? Thank you.

Barbara: Try Sky and Telescope's Web site.

robertbl22: What kind of binoculars (what power) do you recommend for viewing Mars?

Barbara: Any kind will work.

(Moderator) Brooke: We're working on answering your questions right now. If you haven't seen your question answered yet, please wait a moment as it is in the queue to be answered. Many thanks for your patience.

cosmo36: Hello, Is it possible for any unexplained Observation in 2003, on Earth? For instance perhaps unstable Magorstetic outer core disturbance that cause anything such as car malfunction?

Barbara: Opposition of the planets happens regularly. For Mars, it’s every two years. Mars isn't big enough to cause any disturbance on Earth.

(Moderator) Brooke: To those who want to see tracks of other near Earth objects, visit http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/

gayle: How much difference in time does it take to get to Mars when the Earth and Mars aren't so close to each other?

Barbara: The fastest we can get there is about six months, but slowest could be years or more.

omnologos: Why not rovers on the Moon too?

Barbara: I wish! Many groups are proposing them, but NASA only has so much money. And we can't do everything. Hopefully, you'll see these in the future.

jjgravity: Will this conjunction happen with an eclipsed moon any time in the next few years?

Barbara: Great question. It's much rarer to happen with a lunar eclipse -- probably many years in between.

Erin: Regarding a question from gayle; might want to mention that (I think) the Curiosity mission was supposed to launch in time to take advantage of this opposition, but was delayed.

Barbara: Yes, that's right. There was a mission delay that caused us to miss the 2009 launch window, so next window is 2011.

Artemis: Are there other options besides the Aries project for space travel if this administration decides to kill the budget? It would be a shame if we couldn't explore the Moon or Mars.

Barbara: I can't speculate about future U.S. spaceflight plans. Right now we're staying focused on our current spacecraft such as LRO, MRO, and of course Spirit and Opportunity,

Ken: What is your opinion on the possibility of life on subsurface Mars, and would surface life be impossible due to radiation and sublimation of any water?

Barbara: We don't currently have any evidence for life on Mars. We think life depends on having liquid water and a benign radiation environment. So our Mars missions are looking for environments such as these where life might be able to live.

gwotty: Hi, Just joined & I'm happy to say after 2 weeks of total cloud, we have a FANTASTIC clear sky for viewing Mars & Moon tonight. I'm looking at it as we chat, out of my window, here in UK......

Barbara: Great -- good luck. If people have telescopes, they can take a look on any magnification. You can use binocular or the naked eye.

nasa: Will this be orange in colour?

Barbara: Yes, Mars is orange because the rocks are oxidized, making them red like rust.

robertbl22: How long will opposition last, or how long will it affect viewing?

Barbara: It's a moment in time, technically, but you can see it in that position for many days. In a year, it will be in its opposite configuration called conjunction, when it goes behind the sun.

One_Witchy_Woman: Can I take a picture of the moon and mars with a regular digital camera and have the halo show? Do I need something special?

Barbara: Yes, but the moon is so much brighter than Mars that it might not show up.

nasa: Will it look like a orange star next to the moon, when viewing with naked eyes?

Barbara: Yes, it will. But it won't twinkle like other stars.

revrosales: Humans have spent more than the six months for a trip to mars in the ISS and Mir already, correct?

Barbara: Oh yes. We learn a lot about how humans will be able to handle long spaceflight from our experience on the ISS. One difference is that the ISS is protected from radiation by Earth's magnetic field.

omnologos: Are the lessons learned from Spirit getting stuck being applied to Curiosity or is it too late?

Barbara: Yes, many lessons learned about the nature of the Martian surface, and the mechanics of roving. But Curiosity is probably not going to the same place, so we'll have more to learn when Curiosity arrives.

cbekiaris: what is your favorite color??!

Barbara: Magenta. :)

(Moderator) Brooke: This is a moderated chat. If you haven't seen your question answered yet, please wait a moment as it is in the queue to be answered. Many thanks for your patience.

Artemis: How long does it take to reach Mars with conventional spacecraft, and how long are the Martian seasons?

Barbara: Six months to arrive with current spacecraft. Martian year is about two years, so each Martian season is about six months.

llama1: Does NASA have any tentative schedule for sending people to Mars?

Barbara: No, not yet.

ZhaneDoe: Explain Perigee.

Barbara: The Moon's orbit around the Earth isn't exactly a circle, but an ellipse or oval. Earth isn't in the center. One end of the oval is far from Earth, one is close. When the moon is at the far end, it's called apogee. Near end is perigee. The orbit is once a month.

nasa: Can we see the pictures of mars as of today's event?

Barbara: There will be images online at various Web sites.

TaviGreiner: Read today that the Full Moon 15% of the Sun's light, compared to just 8% the day before or after - that's a 50% difference for not really much difference in illumination. Are those numbers accurate?

Barbara: I don't know if the exact numbers are accurate, but yes, the combination of the full moon and perigee make this full moon very bright compared to other full moons this year.

greg_p10: Can bacon be cooked in outer space? I need to settle a bet....

Barbara: Yes. If it couldn't, I wouldn't want to go! J

yummynuga: Will I be able to see Mars in the night sky?

Barbara: Yes, very close to the full moon. You must have clear skies.

Artemis: Will Mars be relatively visible to the naked eye this evening?

Barbara: Yes, will look like an orange "star" that doesn't twinkle.

quarkspin: Why use orbiters, landers, and rovers? Are there advantages to each?

Barbara: There are advantages to each kind of mission. Orbiters give you a global view of the planet. Rovers allow you to explore a small area in great detail. Landers allow you to do long-term observations in the same place.

goody: Question is there really a ring around earth made up of space junk??

Barbara: Yes, there is a lot of space junk around the Earth. NASA monitors it locations to make sure our satellites and the ISS have a clear orbital path.

WIstormspotter: Do you guys get a good laugh every time that article gets thrown out on the internet about Mars being so close to the earth it will be as large as a full moon?

Barbara: Yes, we do. :) Mars is not ever going to appear as large as the moon.

ZhaneDoe: How long is Mars away from earth?

Barbara: About 70 million miles.

cbekiaris: But seriously, is there any way to view Mars from Illinois at night? if so what kind of telescope would you recommend? And is there any way to view the moon and Mars at the same time?

Barbara: If it's not cloudy you can see Mars near the full moon tonight. To the naked eye, it will look like a small orange dot. With binoculars or telescope, you can see the disk.

Azorean: Hi all, Portugal here! Without the magnetosphere protection, it's not dangerous to travel between Earth and Mars?

Barbara: Yes. One of the primary risks in traveling between the Earth and Mars will be radiation. Humans and spacecraft will both need to be protected.

Clover: Is there a set date for sending another probe to explore Mars?

Barbara: Yes, Curiosity will launch in 2011.

julieta: Which features/aspects of the moon can viewers see today that can't be seen in another time of the year?

Barbara: It's about the same for each full moon, just brighter tonight.

Erin: Does having the Moon and Mars both being at least a little bit closer to Earth (compared to other times) affect tides?

Barbara: Great question. Yes, the closer the moon, the higher the tides. Perigee moon causes higher than normal tides by a tiny bit (millimeters). Mars has no measurable effect on Earth tides.

ZhaneDoe: Was water really found on the moon?

Barbara: Heck yeah! :) LCROSS kicked up a big cloud that had gallons of water in it.

Michael_C.: It’s cool that this event is taking place on the NASA Day Of Remembrance. A fitting tribute!

Barbara: Yes, all of us at NASA are remembering our lost comrades.

TaviGreiner: Will future human missions to Mars pose the same/similar dust issues that we faced with the Moon?

Barbara: Yes, but no. :) Mars is a dusty place, but Mars dust is very different than moon dust. Mars dust is rounded, moon dust is jagged. Mars dust is oxidized like rust, so it may react with metal. We'll have to deal with Mars dust in a different way.

omnologos: Is there a website with all scheduled and proposed future Mars missions?

Barbara: Yes, visit www.nasa.gov

(Moderator) Brooke: Learn more about past, present, and future Mars missions at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/

Mitch: I'm a retired NASA Expert and have heard rumor of a space rover to launch for Jupiter in 2012?

Barbara: Jupiter has no solid surface, so rovers won't work. :) But, NASA is sending a probe called JUNO in a few years.

yummynuga: How big is the moon?

Barbara: About 2,000 miles in diameter.

(Moderator)Brooke: Learn more about NASA's JUNO mission to Jupiter at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html

Sunstreaked: What exactly does a planetary scientist do?

Barbara: Web chats! :) Seriously, I study rocks from other planets to learn about their geology. We get the rocks here from missions like Apollo, or delivered to us as meteorites.

(Moderator) Brooke: We're working on answering your questions right now. If you haven't seen your question answered yet, please wait a moment as it is in the queue to be answered. Many thanks for your patience.

Yellowstone: Why is Mars the only red planet (oxidized)?

Barbara: It's not the only red planet. Jupiter is kind of red, and so is Mercury because oxygen has reacted to minerals on those planets as well.

johnpv: Will Curiosity investigate about the methane too, or is that a mission for MAVEN and later?

Barbara: I believe there's a joint ESA/NASA mission called Mars Trace Gas Explorer that will specifically investigate methane and other atmospheric gases.

vca186: Since Mars is closer to Earth than usual, what effect does its gravity have on Earth’s orbit?

Barbara: No measurable effect.

goody: Is there any possibility of another planet that can support life like Earth??

Barbara: Definitely. What we need to support life are air to breathe, water, shelter, and sunlight -- and solid surface. Other planets may not have the natural perfect combination, but we can bring some things with us or create them there.

Mitch: Will the Earth and Mars ever collide? When is that projected to be?

Barbara: No, they won't collide. The orbits are stable even if they're not perfect circles.

guest: Where will Mars be in relation to the Moon tonight?

Barbara: Within about a "fist" of the moon, to the naked eye.

TaviGreiner: For current Mars viewing, is one hemisphere more prominent than the other (N vs. S)?

Barbara: Only very slightly more visible in the northern hemisphere.

Erin: What would your reactions be if life was found on Mars?

Barbara: I think it would be one of the most interesting discoveries of all time.

(Moderator) Brooke: Learn more about the MAVEN mission mentioned earlier at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/news/maven_20080915.html

Joyce: When is man going to Mars?

Barbara: We don't know yet. NASA doesn't have a current date.

(Moderator) Brooke: This is a moderated chat. If you haven't seen your question answered yet, please wait a moment as it is in the queue to be answered. Many thanks for your patience.

SpaceChimp16: I see the moon, full and clear and a small orange-y star looking thing on the top left from the moon, how big will Mars get? I am 16 and I'm really excited!!

Barbara: Yes! :) Mars looks like small star with the naked eye. It won't be very large.

planewatchers: Should we expect to see a halo with this evening’s event as we did last night?

Barbara: The halo you saw is probably related to your local weather. You might have ice crystals in your local atmosphere.

Erin: What originally got you interested in Planetary Science?

Barbara: I took a class in college about geology and how you can "read" rocks to understand the planet. I thought it would be cool to read the history of a planet that I couldn't step on.

werkbert: Hi. Q? If the moon is moving away from Earth (1 inch a yr), did the moon look any different in the sky 1 bil or 2 bil yrs ago vs. today and by what % bigger?

Barbara: It is moving away from the Earth, so it did appear bigger, but we don't really know where it was 3 billion years ago. Scientists are working on models to understand this.

BEA: When can I see the full moon the best?

Barbara: Tonight is the full moon. It will look nearly full tomorrow night.

(Moderator) Brooke: We're working on answering your questions right now. If you haven't seen your question answered yet, please wait a moment as it is in the queue to be answered. Many thanks for your patience.

Erin: What classes in school or experiences do you feel prepared you for work as a Planetary Scientist?

Barbara: All of them. :) Math, science, writing -- I do a lot of writing. Problem-solving and critical thinking.

TaviGreiner: Why do planets not twinkle, as opposed to the stars that do?

Barbara: Because they're closer to Earth than stars, they aren't perfect point sources of lights. They're disks.

Michael_C.: Are Phobos and/or Deimos ever closer to the Earth than Mars? Thank you.

Barbara: No, very close to Mars.

ve3cxb: Regarding the electron microscope image of the alleged bacterial-like life form found in the Martian meteorite several years ago that caused all the excitement. I'm a professional electron microscopist so as soon as I saw that photo I knew it wasn't a life form. However I never did hear what you folks determined it to be.

Barbara: Yes, they were too small to be life forms as we know life, so probably are minerals.

the11ama: Would a spacecraft sending people to mars contain a rotating section for artificial gravity?

Barbara: We don't know how to solve that problem yet. We use research on ISS to determine long-term effects of microgravity on humans.

guest: Does NASA have any tentative schedule for returning people to the Moon?

Barbara: I can't speculate on the future of U.S. spaceflight plans. However, here at Marshall are working on plans to send robotic missions to the moon for science.

omnologos: What do you think of the proposal of sending people to Mars on one-way tickets? It'd make a great site for a retirement home!

Barbara: NASA isn't in the business of sending humans to places where we can't bring them home safely.

WIstormspotter: Will Mars transit the moon at all tonight or will they basically be moving in sync with each other?

Barbara: The moon occulted -- passed in front of -- Mars during conjunction in 2007 but won't this year.

CollinDue: Will the nearness of MARS cause a shift in the tide, or change the ocean's PULL in any way?

Barbara: No, Mars is too small to have measureable effect on the tides.

guest: Would it be to the left, right, above or below the full Moon tonight?

Barbara: It's to the west, but what you see will depend on where you're observing from tonight. Check the Sky and Telescope Web page.

CollinDue: Does NASA have any regulation/restrictions in regards to leaving Spacecraft debris on MARS?

Barbara: Yes. We have a policy called Planetary Protection that governs our decisions in sending and leaving spacecraft.

Erin: How do you feel about the argument of robotic versus human missions to the Moon and Mars?

Barbara: Good question. Robotic and human missions are complementary to each other. You need both to effectively explore the solar system.

revrosales: Barbara, I recall reading about a training simulation in Russia that involved six months of isolation for the "crew", and that there would be more simulations in the near future. Any idea when further simulations are scheduled to run? –Thanks

Barbara: Sorry, I don't know.

Erin: What are your thoughts on the private companies aiming for landings on the Moon?

Barbara: The Google lunar X-Prize projects are very exciting. I'd love to see a whole fleet of rovers and landers on the moon.

hello: Are you posting the pics on NASA website?

Barbara: No, but many other sites will be.

Erin: Yes, bacon can be cooked in space. Heat works the same way there as here. But remember, there's nothing to hold it to a frying pan! =D

Barbara: Agreed. :) Maybe you could spin the frying pan really quickly.

LuDean: How many rover robots are currently operating on Mars?

Barbara: Two: Spirit and Opportunity. Both are still going after six years.

TaviGreiner: Why does the Full Moon look so much larger against the horizon than in the sky? Is this an illusion created by our atmosphere, the curvature of our Earth, or simply the perspective of foreground objects? I've seen explanations for all three.

Barbara: You're right, an illusion. The perspective of foreground objects is by far the greatest contributor.

Erin: Would you rather see humans first go to the Moon or to Mars?

Barbara: It's a personal opinion, but I'd like to see humans go to the Moon first.

jmorcone: Why is this the fullest moon of the year? What makes it bigger than others... is it the proximity to Earth?

Barbara: Yes, proximity at perigee makes it the biggest full moon of the year.

Richard_Stember: In the announcement that the MER Spirit is now a stationary observatory it was mentioned that it be used to determine if Mars has a solid of liquid core. How will this be done? Measuring wobbles in its orbit?

Barbara: Yes, this technique is very much like the laser ranging arrays on the moon. The position of the spacecraft when stationary tells you how the planet wobbles around its axis, which is related to its internal structure.

CollinDue: Would Mars have a sky if we added more water on the surface?

Barbara: I think you're asking about an atmosphere? Yes, if Mars were warmer and there were liquid water there would be thicker atmosphere and the sky would be bluer.

the11ama: How different would Mars look tonight between someone on the ground and someone on the ISS?

Barbara: Almost no difference because Mars is so far away.

TaviGreiner: Are meteoroids / asteroids of much concern when sending crafts to Mars?

Barbara: Micrometeorites are a great concern. They are everywhere and we have to make spacecraft able to withstand them.

earthvisitor: With the newest announcements of cuts to NASA, will Curiosity still launch as scheduled or is it in danger?

Barbara: Just can't speculate right now. Sorry!

DankNugs: Is the moon made of cheese?

Barbara: No. :) It’s made of rocks like Earth and other planets.

Vladimir: If there’s water on mars does that mean we can live there if we actually go to it?

Barbara: It would certainly help!

cbekiaris: I want to say thank you for answering my question, I’m in my high school astronomy class right now working on a worksheet (you don’t need to answer this or anything) but for someone at NASA to answer my question is really awesome! Also all the silly questions you are getting like the one about bacon in space, they are all from kids in my class so on behalf of Mundelein High School Astronomy class I want to say thank you for amusing us. I hope you have a nice day!

Barbara: My pleasure. Now get back to work! :)

Vladimir: How would it take us to get to Mars if we flew there?

Barbara: Six months at the best.

omnologos: Mars has no effect on Earth...has the Earth any effect on Mars?

Barbara: No, no measurable effect. The biggest effects on Mars are the Sun and Jupiter.

LuDean: Would a manned mission to Mars potentially launch from a base on the Moon?

Barbara: Good question. Some people think it would be helpful to launch from the moon because the moon's gravity is lower than Earth, but at this point we build everything on Earth. So we'd have to launch from Earth to the moon first, which probably negates savings now.

Karl_Hovekamp: Could it be there is liquid water on Mars periodically (in millions of years)?

Barbara: You may have heard that Mars has what we call "chaotic obliquity" which means over many millions of years, the seasons aren't constant and could be warmer. Maybe warm enough to have liquid water. Missions are looking for evidence of that liquid water, even though it's not there now.

(Moderator) Brooke: We've got time to answer just a few more questions.

Erin: Was there any modifications proposed to be made to Curiosity to protect it, when the Martian dust devils were discovered by Spirit and Oppy?

Barbara: We already knew that there's dust in the Martian atmosphere. Curiosity won't rely on solar panel for power like Spirit and Opportunity do.

DankNugs: Are there rocks on other planets that look like some from Earth or the moon?

Barbara: Do you mean meteorites? Spirit and Opportunity have found rocks on Mars that come from the asteroid belt, but so far none that we think came from the Earth or the moon.

WIstormspotter: Now that the LCROSS mission had found that there is water on the moon, Is there anything else that is worth looking for on the moon?

Barbara: Sure. Resources on the moon are things like light, water, and the oxygen found in the rocks.

(Moderator) Brooke: We've only got time for 2 more questions.

TaviGreiner: We've returned dust from a comet - why have we not returned samples from asteroids or Mars? Do on-site investigations with rovers tell us as much as would a sample return?

Barbara: Sample return is an important part of space exploration. We can learn more about the rocks in our labs and do duplicate analysis. Sample return missions are proposed for Mars and the moon and hopefully will happen soon.

adam: Why can liquid water not exist on the surface of Mars for extended periods of time?

Barbara: To have liquid water, you have to have warmth and pressure. Mars is very cold and has a very thin atmosphere, so water isn't stable as a liquid. We've seen it exist as a solid.

Bill_Macfarlane: Several years ago, Mars was at it closest in many thousands of years. What is the difference in distance now compared to back then?

Barbara: presently about twice as far away during this conjunction as during the 2003 conjunction, when it was closest

(Moderator) Brooke: Thanks to all of you for all the great questions, and thanks to our guest scientist, Barbara Cohen! Our Mars Opposition chat is now closed, but you can find more information at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010/26jan_mars.htm Check back on Monday for a posted transcript of today’s chat. Have a great weekend.

A Day at Desert-RATS

2009-09-12T20:23:00.002-06:00

I spent an amazing couple of weeks in northern Arizona with the Desert-RATS team this year. The Desert RATS field test activity coordinates individual science, technology and operations development efforts into a field test demonstration under representative (analog) planetary surface terrain conditions. The purpose of the RATS effort is to drive out preliminary exploration operational concepts for EVA system requirements by providing hands-on experience with simulated planetary surface exploration extravehicular activity (EVA) hardware and procedures. The 2009 Desert RATS activity had the first significant integration of science into the overall operational scenario by providing geological context and protocols both prior to and during surface activities at the Black Point Lava Flow. We had one half of an operations trailer for the SSR. Each day, we had eight backroom functions and two field observers out in the real world looking over the crew’s shoulders. I got to rotate though field observing, the three “expert” stations (Petrography, GigaPan, and Structures), and SciCom, who communicated directly with the crew during science operations. August 29/30 were one-day traverses by Crew B (Andy Thomas and Jake Bleacher), and September 2-9 were geologic traverses during a 14-day test by Crew A (Mike Gernhard and Brent Garry). I was an SSR observer on Sept. 3 and here’s the play-by-play. Keep up with their photos here!

7:45 today I’ll try to keep up a stream from the science backroom @DESERT_RATS. It's a very busy place but today I am a floater/observer.
7:56 our day has already started with a tagup at 7 am and everyone is busily preparing for wheels rolling at 8:14.
8:02 the astronauts are in the rover and the science backroom is starting the daily pretraverse briefing. it's in powerpoint, of course :/
8:07 Jose is PI today; he planned the traverse and science objectives, and is explaining them to the crew.
8:10 the science prep purposefully used only bw aerial imaging. It's up to the crew travers to help us understand the area and its geology
8:18 Lunar Electric Rover (LER) is rolling
8:40 the crew has reached station 1 and are preparing for egress; backroom is using LER cameras to see the surroundings
8:45 EV1 (Jake) is in his suit and backroom gave him a set of targets to sample. it's a collaboration between what we want and what he can get.
8:55 EV2 (Andy) is in the LER feeding images and descriptions to us
9:05 nearing the end of the 25 minute EVA; we bagged 2 basalt rocks and a soil.
9:08 and a bonus float rock from EV2. thanks Jake!
9:10 phew, that was frantic. backroom captures images, documents samples, types observations, keeps time, and reassesses on the fly.
9:16 on the short drive to the next site, EV2 is hanging out in the suit port
9:22 we're getting a narrative of site 2 environs and preparing for a rapid Gigapan acquisition
9:26 when crew goes out of LER, it's egress. when they hang out in the back and step off, it's offgress. Offgress?
9:30 now at site 2. we only have a single comm channel and right now it's cacophonous.
9:31 science objectives at site 2; contact between lava flow and sandstone; sample sandstones.
9:53 we've accumulated 20 mins negative time, so site 3 will be drive-by rather than EVA
9:59 the flexible shroud that covers the suit ports is called the Cabana, and you *know* that always triggers Barry Manilow in my mind.
10:38 pays to have an itchy trigger finger: snuck in a quick gigapan when the crew stopped to answer some medical metrics
10:40 I walked out of the trailer and nearly bumped into the ATHLETE. Yowza.
10:45 passing stations 4 and 5, small mesas of the beautiful red Moenkopi formation
11:04 the LER navigates on GPS and Google Earth. Good thing we've also got Google Moon!
11:08 large brownish quadrupeds surrounded by a large fence-like formation on the left
11:20 driving over shale and brush to the next visible outcrop. science backroom is catching up and filling out metrics (ugh)
11:32 oooh, someone brought in otter pops for the backroom! :)
11:33 found station 6 via combination of K10 reconnaissance knowledge and realtime navigation
11:39 preparing for dual crew egress. station 6 goals: sample lava flow and sandstone; compare with previous site stratigraphy
12:11 one of the reasons I am here is to understand ops differences between Apollo and MER. they are as big as I expected!
12:18 lunchtime!!
12:55 science backroom took the lunchbreak to modify the traverse plans for the afternoon. No science is worth staying until 9 pm :)
13:01 psyched to see @marsrovergirl here @DESERT_RATS; she's putting ATHLETE thru its paces
13:34 hooray! BubbleCam is functional, capturing images right below the LER nose.
13:50 heading on a northern spur where we may lose comm; briefing the team on EVA activities without us in the loop
13:58 passing old tracks, footprints, cowpatties. If we could find them on Mars, we'd be golden :)
14:04 hooeee our science backroom trailer is a'rockin in the fierce wind outside
14:07 oh and also, tons of fun to Dust_devil_WATCH
14:23 ok, finally to station 8. science goals: describe and sample every unit. modest, we know.
14:35 during EVAs, we get video from cameras on the crew's halmets and shoulders, and we get to control the rover cameras to zoom in on outcrops.
15:04 extremely successful station 8 with 10 samples in 25 minutes! rocks : geologists :: donuts : Homer Simpson.
15:07 gorgeous photo of station 8 from @DESERT_RATS http://yfrog.com/9dvhdj
15:36 we're making extensive use of GigaPan. 360 color coverage at 2 elevations in 1.93 minutes. But no near IR channels.
15:41 driving thru soft soils in a wash; soil is caking on the wheels. But its shallow compared with LER's big fat tires (mmm cake and a Fat Tire)
16:00 team is doing dome driveby geology on the way home. conglomerates, high albedo depressions, mesas oh my
16:55 made good time on the way back so were able to squeeze in one more EVA. Crew and ops are both feeling good about the day!
16:56 pics from the last EVA of the day http://yfrog.com/bcl5ij
17:31 LER is back in camp; science team is discussing and preparing debrief
17:42 We get 15 minutes with the crew after Human Factors gets their info.
18:17 Great job everyone. it was a long day but we all learned a LOT :)

Decadal Survey in 140 characters or less

2009-09-01T12:08:00.002-06:00

I'm a member of the Inner Planets panel of the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. We're responsible for representing the communities who study Mercury, Venus, and the Moon. We recently held our first panel meeting in Washington DC and I tried to twitter along. The tweets were crossposted to Facebook and generated a lot of interesting discussion too! But if you aren't a fan of those two sites, here's the running narrative.

August 26th

6:21 AM I'm headed to DC for a meeting of the Inner Planets panel of the Decadal Survey. Hoping to twitter it! Stay tuned.

1:16 PM kicking off the closed session with boring but necessary logistics. http://bit.ly/QPq6U

1:24 PM I wonder how many mission statements you can sing to the tune of the Preamble to the Constitution. Well, at least one, the NAS.

1:30 PM the National Academy of Science started around he civil war; early studies included "how to keep soldiers from drinking too much whiskey"

1:37 PM in order of descending age: National Academy of Sciences > smackwell > Space Studies Board > NASA > me

2:27 PM bias and conflict of interest, or, True Confessions, Science Edition.

2:44 PM wow, what an impressive group of people assembled in this room. http://bit.ly/4iFWMO

3:07 PM I'll never, ever be sick of listening to Steve Squyres

3:52 PM open session (Ellen says, "truly open") beginning now. live webcast at https://admin.acrobat.com/_a825035659/psdecadal/

4:14 PM Only planetary bodies without current or planned missions: Uranus and Neptune. Good time to be a planetary scientist!

4:35 PM Discovery draft AO is signed and expected by FY09; AO by CY09; cost cap $425M excluding LV and ASRG provided as GFE. LOL and BYOB.

4:53 PM How is community input is shaping up for lunar science in white papers for the Decadal Survey? http://www.lpi.usra.edu/decadal/leag/

5:31 PM was the last decadal survey *too* detailed in specifying what missions were expected to accomplish? or does detail help scope the issues?

5:46 PM open session is over. we're breaking before a working dinner. predinner: small group to get the creative juices flowing ;)

August 27

8:07 AM ILN is first on the agenda today; nerves starting to set in.

8:09 AM Inner Planets webcast and telecon number are listed on our agenda: http://bit.ly/QPq6U

10:08 AM Sean Solomon is talking about Mercury now. Mercury is cool (hot). Also Sean is wearing an excellent abstract-modern-planetary tie.

10:21 AM Great acronym for a Mercury mission: WGBMWGMWDPD! (We're Going Back to Mercury and We're Going to Map the Whole Damn Planet Dammit!)

10:34 AM huh, Mercury's spectra are pretty flat - not much ability to pull out mineralogy.

10:40 AM Post-MESSENGER, Bepi-Columbo ESA/JAXA mission with dual coplanar orbiters to Mercury in 2014. What should be next? Landers or sample return?

11:35 AM ahhhh, for days spent lounging by warm salty oceans on Venus.

1:04 PM 2 really awesome lunch discussions with 2 of my science idols, wow, I am lucky to be here.

1:08 PM Sue Smrekar: Venus challenges our ideas of how a terrestrial planet "should" work.

1:54 PM Jim Head on future science for Moon & Mars: the future is not in plastics, but plasticity - that is, adaptability and opportunity

2:22 PM Did Carl Sagan really call the Moon a burned-out cinder? Wow. That's harsh.

2:37 PM Venus: Earth's twin? Earth's sister? Earth's future self? Some other relation?

2:42 PM Jim Head: Could global resurfacing (Venus) happen here? If I were in charge of Earth, I'd worry about it; fortunately for everyone I'm not.

3:34 PM For the rest of the afternoon, we'll be talking about JPL, APL, and GSFC support for mission studies we'll be exploring.

4:14 PM I have a new role model: Ellen Stofan. She's brilliant, organized, and wears pink.

4:36 PM GSFC on LRO: "Even though this mission went to the Moon, it really was very much like a planetary mission"

5:18 PM thank you thank you thank you GSFC and APL presenters for making up schedule time.

August 29

8:15 AM Inner Planets starting in 15 minutes; join us using info here http://bit.ly/QPq6U

8:17 AM Sample Return: Part of a balanced and nutritious planetary mission portfolio

8:44 AM Sample return missions include more than just the mission itself - curation and laboratory facilities are crucial (but legacy)

8:55 AM atmospheric sample return from Venus?

9:39 AM lunar meteorites = poor man's sample return mission

10:12 AM Closed session until lunch - discussing all the work we have in front of us!

10:25 AM Everyone should be writing or endorsing White Papers - it's your way of letting us know what's important to you!! http://tiny.cc/ID2Ch

11:37 AM How well did NASA follow the recommendations of the last Planetary Decadal Survey? http://bit.ly/8dFlh

12:59 PM White papers *must* be submitted via the SSB web page by September 15! http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ssb/SSEdecadal2011.html

3:27 PM this afternoon: DCA-PHX, shuttle to Flagstaff. Tomorrow I join @DESERT_RATS; *so* psyched!

ILN update

2009-08-19T18:26:00.002-06:00

Several of you have asked for a mission status for the ILN. Things have been in flux for the last couple of weeks but look like they are settling out so it's a good time to update you, and also to ask for your help.

The project has been conducting trade studies in response to HQ's changing directions regarding this mission, finally presenting two alternatives to HQ: a 2-node solar-battery option and a 4-node ASRG option. Neither one fits under the original $200M cost cap (unsurprisingly). Therefore OMB initiated a review of the project to understand the design and cost and to define "alternatives." The review went well and found that the cost and schedule for the mission concepts were in-family. You can see a summary of the ILN project to date in my NLSI talk.

However, in the current budget, SMD cannot afford the ILN. So for FY10, HQ has chosen to allocate the project $3.7M and direct it to become the Lunar Quest lander project office, who will conduct risk-reduction activities on a generic ILN-class lander. SMD's current stance is to wait for the results of the Decadal Survey to decide what direction to take for a lunar lander mission, which may or may not be ILN, depending on the Decadal prioritization.

If you think the ILN idea is still a good one, I urge you to sign on to Clive Neal's white paper to the Decadal Survey about the importance of a lunar geophysical network. Having an interested and enthusiastic community backing will help the ILN achieve a high prioritization in the Decadal Survey.

The Moon is a planet too

2009-07-10T14:23:00.002-06:00

The Moon would totally be its own planet if it weren't orbiting the Earth. Also, it deserves its own capital letter. However, style-conforming blog post follows, from the LRO and LCROSS blog site. Enjoy!

Lunar scientist Barbara Cohen explains how our moon functions very much like a planet.

You've all probably heard about the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decision to define a planet -- probably because it clarified that there is a big belt of icy objects out beyond the orbit of Neptune, and we now know that Pluto is one of thousands of them. The IAU definition also excludes moons from being planets. But did you know our moon functions like a planet? It has a lot to teach us about how planets form and evolve.

Solar system rendering of the eight planets. (Image credit: Koolang Astronomical Observatory and Science Display Center)

Like the Earth, our moon has a crust, a mantle and a core. These interior layers we think are present on most planets, even if the crust is made of rock or ice. Mars probably has a crust, mantle, and core, and so do Venus and Mercury. The rocks we brought back from the moon from the Apollo missions helped us learn that this process of forming internal layers, or differentiation, is a common process on all planets. So when the moon formed, it formed like a planet.

Another hallmark of planets is that they have active geology. The big, dark splotches you see on the moon’s surface are lava flows. Yes, there were active volcanoes on the moon. There aren’t any volcanic cones, because the lava was very fluid and flowed out through cracks and into low-lying areas. The Apollo samples contain small beads of volcanic glass that tell us there were giant fire-fountains on the moon too. Though volcanic activity on the moon ended about 3 billion years ago, the Apollo missions picked up thousands of earthquakes on the moon, or moonquakes. Moonquakes tell us that the moon is not geologically dead. It's still acting like a planet today.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. (Image credit: Photo Credit: National Park Service)

My favorite part about planets is their impact craters, formed when asteroids or comets whizz into our part of space and collide. When you look at the moon, you can see that it preserves many impact craters on it for researchers like me to study. Did you know that all the craters you see on the moon (and there are hundreds of thousands of them!) had counterparts on the Earth at one point? We don't see many impact craters on Earth today because the Earth's crust continually renews itself and erases old rocks and formations. No one rock on Earth is older than 4 billion years. The Earth definitely got beat up by impacts from comets and asteroids in its past -- and that record is preserved for us to study on the moon.

For me, the best thing about the moon is that it may not be defined as a planet, but it definitely acts like one. Studying the moon allows us to learn about how all planets work. And because the moon is ancient, it's like a time capsule back into the early days of our solar system. But, I also love that the moon looks so beautiful reflecting sunlight to us on dark nights and I can't wait to get more information from our two lunar missions. Go LRO and LCROSS!

Uranium on the Moon?

2009-07-04T12:04:00.005-06:00

A spate of recent articles is covering the presentation of the first orbital uranium maps of the lunar surface, like this article in SpaceRef (the original work was presented by the Kaguya GRS team, including my former colleague Bob Reedy, at this year's LPSC). Some of these articles suggest that the new maps mean "nuclear power plants could be built on the moon, or even that Earth's satellite could serve as a mining source for uranium needed back home." Just how significant is this new finding?

The media is spinning this as "uranium discovered on the Moon," but in fact we've known about uranium in lunar samples since the return of the Apollo 11 samples in 1968. When the lunar samples came back, there was a phase in them that was highly enriched in potassium (K), rare earth elements (REE) and phosphorus (P), among other freaky elements. This material was nicknamed KREEP, and the moniker stuck. Lunar rocks are known to contain hundreds of ppb uranium, and some minerals up to 4000 ppm. The natural decay of uranium to He and lead is a commonly-used dating scheme for lunar rock ages.

So what is this KREEP layer, anyway? During planetary formation, minerals crystallize and sink or float depending on their density. That gives early planets a layered internal structure - the crust, mantle, and core. However, uranium (along with other similar elements like Th, K, etc.) doesn't have an affinity for fitting into most common minerals. They are called "incompatible" elements for being incompatible with mineral structures. As the Moon crystallized, these elements stayed in a liquid layer and wound up being squeezed between the crust and mantle. This layer contains all those incompatible elements, the leftovers of differentiation.

After the Moon formed its layered structure, giant impacts dug below the crust and scattered the KREEP layer over the surface, mostly on the nearside where the crust is thin. So when you look at a thorium map of the Moon, you're looking at the surface expression of KREEP, including all those incompatible elements like U.

The real news story here isn't that there is uranium on the Moon, but that it's the first time U has been directly detected from orbit. The natural decay of uranium emits characteristic gamma rays, which can be measured from orbit by very sensitive instrumentation. Because U is only present in trace amounts, it's a truly amazing accomplishment for the Kaguya GRS to measure these gamma rays from orbit. The new information will allow us to understand the distribution of U on the surface, which gives us insight into how the KREEP layer was dug up and flung about. Congratulations to the Kaguya GRS team!

Opportunity peace out, y'all

2008-09-05T08:43:00.004-06:00

Opportunity leaves Victoria Crater. More to come.

Sit in on an SOWG

2008-08-15T07:15:00.003-06:00

Hi everyone - sorry to be so lax in posting. I'll try to do better in September (saying I'll post in August is just false hope) :) Here's a website where you can sit in on a meeting of the Science Operations Working Group (SOWG) for MER, posted by Senator John Culberson. If you're expecting a lot of flash and graphics, you'll be out of luck. But if you want to know what it really looks and sounds like to plan a rover day, you can't get any closer to the source. Like all of us, Steve Squyres dials in to JPL from his office at Cornell and follows along with a web browser on his laptop. http://qik.com/video/98040http://qik.com/video/98040

Nepotism and sexism in peer-review

2008-04-21T16:40:00.002-06:00

(Crossposted from WIPSB)

Nepotism and sexism in peer-review
Christine Wennerås & Agnes Wold
Nature 387, 341 - 343 (22 May 1997); doi:10.1038/387341a0

This is a seminal paper - widely-cited and definitely worth reading. It touches on several issues that we brought up at the LPSC breakfast, including whether women are “naturally” less competitive in science than men and the gender balance of review panels for proposals and prizes.

The study used data from applicants to the Swedish Medical Research Council fellowships. Before the study, the United Nations names Sweden as the leading country in the world with respect to equal opportunities for men and women. Also, biology and medicine are fields where gender balance has achieved more parity than other fields of science, and it might be thought that this would be reflected in the award pool.

In the study, applicants were approximately half male and half female. However, awardees were about 75% male and 25% female. The evaluations were based on three categories: scientific competence, quality of the proposed methodology, and relevance of the research proposal. While women did about as well as men in the second two categories, they were judged systematically deficient in the first: basic competence.

The study attempts to break down “scientific competence” from one subjective category into six objective variables based on papers published and citations. The finding that hit me in the gut: to receive the same competence score as a male colleague, a female needed to exceed his scientific productivity by three extra Science or Nature papers, or 20 extra papers in a lower-impact professional journal. Three extra Science or Nature papers?!?!?!?!?

I doubt that any one of the reviewers consciously made a decision to bust the female applicants down a notch. But this is a well-researched, well-documented case of embedded bias. Plus, this serious leak in the pipeline comes at a critical point, when scientists need to transition from being supported graduate students to self-supporting scientists.

Great Moonbuggy Race!

2008-04-05T18:37:00.005-06:00

I volunteered today at the Great Moonbuggy Race, now in its 15th year at MSFC. It was awesome. It reminded me a lot of my favorite extracurricular, Odyssey of the Mind (Olympics of the Mind back in my day), but with a return-to-the-Moon emphasis, so I felt a particular fondness for it and was glad to help out (even though it was cold and drizzly, though thankfully nothing like the downpours the highschool teams competed through yesterday!).

The idea is for teams of highschool and college students to build a human-powered vehicle and race it over an obstacle course. The vehicles end up looking very much like the bare-bones, functional Apollo lunar roving vehicle, built here at MSFC, except with bicycle pedals. The course is over a km long on paved sidewalk and 18 obstacles are placed on it. Most obstacles are basically a sculpted pile of gravel 6 feet long and the width of the course. I thought they looked pretty innocuous when I walked the course but they proved to be very challenging to the vehicles. One of the obstacles was actually a small crater in the lunar landscape area where the LEM replica is - very cool. The last obstacle is a long sand pit that is also pretty challenging for vehicles that choose narrow bicycle wheels.

I didn't see any spectacular wipeouts, but I did see one crash and several disappointments, usually when a bike chain and the vehicle had no more drive. Two teams decided to push their vehicles all the way through when they broke - they got penalties at every obstacle but completed the course! Here are some photos from today's online Huntsville Times of teams in today's race. Oh right - and the vehicles have to fold up to fit in a 4' cubic space. That's my coworker Cheryl checking that requirement today.

Update: Today's Huntsville Times story on the race.

short Doc day today

2008-03-27T16:13:00.004-06:00

Spirit's power is quickly declining as the Martian winter sets in in earnest. Today, I did a Doc shift for Spirit that wrapped up in less than 3 hours! It included some atmospheric monitoring and Pancan 13F imaging as Spirit recharges her batteries in preparation for a great weekend plan.
As the southern hemisphere of Mars cools down and the northern heats up, there's interesting atmospheric effects afoot at the equator. One super-cool thing Opportunity sees these days is clouds. Yep, good ol' water vapor clouds going by. Wonder what shapes Opportunity thinks she sees?

To sleep or not to sleep?

2008-03-25T19:14:00.005-06:00

Today I got a call from my mom, who pleaded with me to tell her we weren't putting the little rover to sleep like a sick animal. It never fails to amaze me how much these rovers capture the public imagination. In reading the news today after she called, the media stories may have been a little out of proportion - we never had a plan to shut one rover down entirely. Anyway, looks like that letter with the funding cuts has been rescinded for now.

Yes, MER was scheduled to take a $4M cut this year and an $8M cut next year, which is about 40% of our current operating budget. When it comes to the rovers, nobody wants them to get more sleep, or go to sleep forever! Least of all the awesome team who operates them every day. But we work within a zero-sum budget, and every year that we ask for more money to keep operating these little dudes means a year when that money can't be spent on new missions. The other currently operating Mars missions, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey also had orders to absorb budget cuts.

Right now, the rover team operates on $20M per year. When we had $40M/yr, we had both rovers planning every weekday, and had abilities like keeping the engineers overtime or on weekends when the planning needed them, or extra staff for troubleshooting, and had all the science team members on board. When we cut back to $20M it was painful, but we accommodated the cut partly by cutting back on operations - like only planning 8 cycles a week and no weekends or overtime, and partly by having some of the science team take cuts to their budgets. Cutting a further 40% means cutting into muscle.

We got the call on Monday and I thought that our PI and project manager had a well-reasoned plan for dealing with this - it wasn't panic and it wasn't chaos. Spirit is hunkered down for the winter, but still requires a full science and engineering staff to send up imaging and monitoring commands. There's lots we can do sitting in one spot, but it wouldn't be tragic to put Spirit into hibernation. We have some good lessons learned from hunkering down in last year's dust storms and would be confident that Spirit would be kept safe until spring. We'd miss out on some interesting science but could deal. Scientists would also take cuts and that's harder on a personal level - too little money means that we have to go work on other projects and it's not easy to come back if & when things ramp back up.

Fortunately, the cuts that put us into that situation appear to be reversed for now. The rovers will surely die someday of natural causes. But for now they continue to do interesting science, and we can do our best to keep getting the most out of them and our team. We ask for the best but plan for what we are given. I think it is fair to say that the whole MER team wants MSL to succeed - indeed, many of the MER team is on the MSL team as well. So it's not really fair to cast it as an us-vs-them situation either.

What's the difference between cancelling a mission and putting a rover to sleep? Wrap your brain around NASA-ese and the MER kerfluffle over on IFOV.

Women drivers on Mars!

2008-03-16T18:24:00.006-06:00

On Feb. 22, we held an all-female uplink team for the Spirit rover! Yay! The rover science and engineering teams have a substantial number of women on them, and uplink teams have been nearly all female just by chance a good number of times, but when our only current female Mission Manager, Cindy, decided to move on to MSL, Ashley (that's her in the photo, wearing a 9-blue-diamond necklace at the Smithsonian) coordinated a true all-women uplink day. And I got to be the Science team chair! What a fantastic experience. It was so interesting to me that having all women didn't really make a difference at all to planning the day. We're all just good at our jobs and get things done! However, both rovers planned nearly identical sols and Spirit was done well before Opportunity ;) And i love being part of a team that can make history for something that we on the rover team now take for granted - that everyone brings knowledge, enthusiasm, and experience to operating these rovers - regardless of gender.

Several places wrote good stories about this cool day:
Science@NASA, which is done at MSFC so is pretty me-centric
Emily at the Planetary Society blog wrote a terrific piece with a personal and enthusiastic slant
The Planetary Society Mars Rover Update also captured the event (scroll down!)

LPSC 2008

2008-03-16T17:43:00.003-06:00

Just returned from the 39th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It's a whirlwind week of research, conversations, networking, old friends, new friends, parties, talking, posters, strategizing, advising, chatting...and then a day to recover my voice, do my laundry, catch up on email, and sort my thoughts.

My favorite thing this LPSC was seeing the Kaguya high-definition TV camera images on a true HDTV set. They look unreal. Really. Like someone cgi-ed a lunar landscape with a beautiful blue marble rising behind it. The videos on the web (Earthrise and Flyover) do not do this instrument justice. Another favorite thing was seeing packed lunar sessions in the big conference room. Planetary scientists study processes and there are some fun processes to study on the Moon - and when people sense that there will be some money to study those processes, they can really pack a room! :) Personally I was glad to see a roomful of potential new collaborators!

My next-favorite thing about this year was the women's breakfast. I have a deep interest in women-in-science issues and though I don't make a big deal of it on this blog, I hope to be starting cross-posting between here and the new Women in Planetary Science blog.

My always- favorite thing is also my nightmare. Literally - I have a common stress nightmare where I am trying to go to an LPSC session but I get stuck in the static field that is the LSPC foyer, full of people, can't move my legs, can't make it to the other side as people keep trapping me to talk to them... OK so it's not really a nightmare in real life, but there is a grain of truth to it. I haven't been at an institution for a long time where I have a ready-made network of diverse collaborators to sit down with an bounce ideas off of. LPSC fills that role for me and I try to take advantage of it. So many amazing people in this field to work with and only a week to talk to them all! Well, I made some good headway.

I did make it to most of the lunar sessions, amazingly, and to Mike Griffin and Alan Stern's presentations on the state of the Agency. Fortunately there was a good roster of bloggers capturing the rest of the conference:

Wednesday presentation by Alan Stern on the state of the Science Mission Directorate
The first three talks of the Kaguya session
LPSC Monday: the MESSENGER presentations
LPSC Tuesday: Lunar talks, poster session, and Io
LPSC Wednesday: More from the Moon - SMART-1 and radar
LPSC Thursday: Rovers, Titan, Mars, Venus Express, Neptune
The grad students at the Martian Chronicles share some of their favorite sessions
Jason at the Gish Chronicles details the Io and Galilean Satellites material

New site for your reading pleasure

2008-03-04T15:30:00.001-07:00

The folks at Adventures in Earth and Space are excellent at their jobs in informal education and run this great blog. Always something fun going on there, including updates on the LRO spacecraft.

Lunar eclipse and impact monitoring

2008-02-24T12:46:00.004-07:00

One of the cooler things going on on the Marshall campus (well, ok, except for making ginormous rockets...) is the Lunar Impact Monitoring project. It is part of the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office (MEO) here at MSFC to characterize meteoroid environments for spacecraft engineering and operations. The Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory (ALaMO) watches dark areas of the moon and looks for bright flashes caused by meteor impacts. ALaMO consists of two telescopes here at MSFC and one in Georgia, all simultaneously monitoring the same area on the Moon. Having the two here allows you to check whether a flash appears in both telescopes to make sure it's not just a random bright pixel on the CCD, like a cosmic ray hit. Having the one in Georgia means you can use parallax to make sure the flash is very far away - glints off of satellites or orbital debris are too close to show up in both states at the same time.

Knowing the meteoroid flux on the Moon and modeling how much debris the impacts kick up is important when you want to build a lunar base, spacesuit, or emergency shelter. If the major danger is from high-velocity primary meteoroid impacts, then you want to have an outer layer of material that takes the brunt of the hit and breaks up the primary so that the inner layer can absorb smaller broken up pieces. But, if there is more danger from the ejecta of these small impacts, the design would be very different and the difference translates to mass and cost uncertainties in design. The present lunar impact flux is also scientifically interesting, as it represents the very small end of the Near Earth Object (NEO) population. The ALaMO sees impacts from roughy fist-sized pieces of debris, most of it already in orbits that intersect the Earth-Moon orbit (NEOs). Extrapolating up to larger sizes is another data point in understanding what debris is nearby our home.

During the lunar eclipse a couple weeks ago, we went out with some local TV crews to talk about the eclipse and general Moon stuff. We intended to use the ALaMO as a backdrop because it looks cool - but the MEO people were there and observing during the eclipse too. Thougheclipses happens during a full, bright moon, which is normally exactly NOT when ALaMO can observe, the few hours of darkness during eclipses enable observation of debris coming from the sunward direction - usually unobservable the rest of the year. How cool is that?

Lunar satellites!

2008-02-20T16:25:00.002-07:00

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I'd tell you more about all the other satellites on their way to the Moon. Well, we turned that effort into a nice little story for Science@NASA that you can check out, complete with links.

Alternatively, here's a quick guide to the instrumentation that's going to fly:

Finally, a real lunar program

2008-02-04T17:53:00.000-07:00

i didn't realize how long it had been since my last post, sorry everyone! I had a great Christmas/New Years/Solstice holidays here in Huntsville and then we took a couple weeks off in January for an actual (well-deserved) vacation.

OK, so today there is big big news in the lunar arena. The President's 2009 budget request for NASA came out and there were many briefings to attend about it (may I just opine, Shana Dale is a really good presenter). The news isn't bad, but certainly NASA didn't get anything more. It's basically keeping up with inflation.

One interesting thing is that Associate Administrator for Science, Alan Stern, is making good on his desire to see a series of lunar science missions. Though it may seem patterned after NASA's wildly successful Mars Exploration Program, the lunar program is considerable smaller, both in resources and capabilities. But with LRO and LCROSS next year, the Discovery mission GRAIL in 2011, a new Ames/Goddard smallsat (LADEE - Lunar Atmospheres and Dust and something with two e's) piggybacked onto the GRAIL launch, and 2 new lunar microlanders to be launched by 2014, we arguably have a lunar exploration program going. And of course, every program needs a management office. It so happens that the Lunar program office will be based here at MSFC!

We're still working to digest what it all means, but I am excited to be here right now!

Oh, er, and the rovers are still going too :)

This made me laugh today/this week/this month

2007-12-22T19:37:00.001-07:00

Catching up on funnies:

Working on the space station: Day 1: Comic where the artist takes reader suggestions for the character's actions. Quite funny, especially if you've ever played an adventure game.

Giant Spider attacks Space Shuttle: "One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords." - Kent Brockman

LRO Lego Model: The Lego model has successfully completed all qualification testing and passed its final acceptance review. The project management is also using this as a test of the LRO team members' ability to problem solve in preparation for I&T. Ron Kolecki will be on call for the mandatory inspection points. Dave Everett will verify the technical integrity. Craig Tooley will make sure you stay on schedule. Good luck, and may the frictional force be with you.

Happy Holidays from Mike Griffin: The Twelve Days of Christmas and the Vision for Space Exploration.

Mars Rover Jr.: It takes pictures of rocks! Also sometimes drills in them.

Roving the Moon (?)

2007-12-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

The House Omnibus spending bill, which was also passed by the Senate last week, contained some pretty specific language in it:

In 2005, NASA selected a team for the development of a lunar lander spacecraft consistent with the goals set forth in the Administration's Renewed Spirit of Discovery and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2005 (Public Law 109155) which called for a robust lunar robotic program, including robotic lunar landers. The National Research Council's report: The Scientific Context for Exploration of the Moon further supports robotic precursor missions to the Moon's surface and the valuable scientific resource such missions will provide for returning humans to the Moon. The Appropriations Committees agree that the NASA selected mission is of critical importance for the exploration vision. For this purpose, $42,000,000 is provided for this lunar lander mission.

From Senator Shelby's press release:

The Program Management Office for NASA’s Lunar Precursor and Robotic Program (LPRP) is based at Marshall Space Flight Center. The program includes the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, LCROSS and Lunar Robotics Lander missions. These missions will gather critical data for the return of the United States to the moon and the potential for a long-term presence there. The bill includes a total of $271.5 million for LPRP, of which $42 million will be for the Lunar Lander mission and another $20 million will be for the program management office for activities associated with the Marshall Space Flight Center. The LPRP management office will be directly involved in the planning and oversight of future lunar robotic missions, integrating lunar data from NASA and other international missions, oversee technology development, and lead NASA’s public outreach and education activities for understanding the lunar environment.

“The LPRP program is an invaluable tool for the scientists and engineers at NASA to determine the best course of action when returning to the moon,” said Shelby. “The President, Congress and the scientific community have repeatedly pointed out the importance of a robotic lunar lander as a precursor to manned flights to the moon. I am glad the bill recognizes this need and Marshall’s role in accomplishing it.”

A couple things are playing out here. As NASA is underfunded in its ambitious Exploration program, it decided to cut the RLEP-2 lunar lander last year, saying all it needed for return to the Moon was "a good map." That might be true if you want to just land once, look around, and fly away. But this return to the Moon (we hope) will be so much more than that. The RLEP-2 mission was designed with two main objectives: characterize potential landing sites from the ground, with an eye on resources like hydrogen/water, and test critical human mission components like automated precision landing and structures.

There are a lot of ideas out there for ultra-low-cost lunar missions, like little rovers for the Google Lunar X-Prize and other small sats. I'm all for creative design of lunar micro-orbiter or micro-landers. They could send back some cool photos or movies, and it would certainly generate a lot of excitement, which is political capital. But, those class of spacecraft can't do the real tasks that scientists and engineers need as part of renewed exploration - that is, sophisticated sample analysis at multiple sites, self-similar platforms to test human lander components, and sample return. To accomplish these significant tasks, we need a more serious investment. Even if you think NASA costs are bloated, try cutting them in half. The MER rovers cost $850 to launch. Cut it in half, then half again for a single lander - you're still over $200M.

So, while RLEP-1 (aka Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) will get our "good map," there's still a lot of work to be accomplished by a serious lander, designed to address outstanding engineering and science goals that benefit planning across all of NASA. So keep your fingers crossed! I definitely am - combining lessons in design, operation, and public value of the MER rovers with forward-looking science and exploration goals on the Moon can't be anything but totally exciting - and why I came to work for NASA.

What I did last week

2007-12-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

Last Friday I gave a short talk on a panel called Forging the Future of Space Science: The Next 50 Years. It was a really fun event celebrating the 2nd International Geophysical Year. The main reason I'm aware of the first Geophysical Year in 1957 is that is when the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was built, establishing a long-term, permanent human presence at the center of the Antarctic continent. I've been to Antarctica twice now with the Antarctic Search for Meteorites, and I know firsthand how much amazing science about our planet - biology, oceanography, volcanology, paleontology, meteorology and climate science, and of course astrobiology and space science - are uniquely enabled by the South Pole and other Antarctic outposts providing vital support and logistics. So it's personally fitting for me to be talking about building a permanent human outpost on the Moon during the 2007 IGY.

It was fun to spend my 10 minutes gushing about the Moon. My main point is that the first time we went to the Moon, planetary science was in its infancy and we were learning how to explore another planet. The knowledge we gained from those missions gave us a framework for thinking about terrestrial planets - things we consider fundamental now, like that they are made of rocks that form through normal igneous processes, they are differentiated into a core, mantle, and crust, and impact craters extensively modified the surface. Then we happily went off, using this knowledge to explore other planets. But we never took that knowledge back to the Moon, to understand the Moon as a unique planet in its own right. The chance to have an outpost and study the lunar South Pole in the same way we've come to be able to work in Antarctica would be an amazing scientific and human accomplishment.

But, setting my 10 minutes of soapbox grandstanding aside, I had a mindblowing day, meeting some giant people who live here in Huntsville. Ernst Stuhlinger spoke first - he is one of the original von Braun rocket team, who emigrated to the US after WWII and jumpstarted the US Space PRogram here in Huntsville, and who went on to serve as associate director for MSFC. I had dinner with Jan Davis, a shuttle and space station astronaut, and Dave Williams, currently President at the University of Alabama Huntsville, but who made his career in iron meteorites and was my ANSMET tentmate Lysa's undergraduate advisor. It's a small, small world.

Workin' on the weekend

2007-12-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I'm volunteering to help move Spirit along. We've just passed the autumnal exuinox on Mars and are sliding into winter, which means the sun is getting low on the horizon and Spirit needs to start tilting toward it. The team has decided to have Spirit winter over on the north side of Home Plate, this great volcanic feature we've been investigating for a while now. We were hoping to get to more exotic territory before Spirit had to stop for the winter, but this year was compounded by the huge summer dust storms - remember when that howling wind actually cleaned the solar panels off? Well, as they say, what goes up must come down, and Mars dust is no exception. Spirit's solar panels are now coated in dust and as the amount of sun and heat declines, so does hope for dust devils. The thick coating of dust has reduced power on Spirit even in advance of the wintertime.

Adding urgency to our mission to keep Spirit safe and healthy is the fact that the rover got trapped in a sand pit on top of Home Plate for a week or so. The always-skillful rover planners extricated Spirit and now she is perched on the edge of the world - as you can see in this Navcam image. Now we're doing some short drives along the edge to map out the slopes and rocks and find a good place for Spirit to slide down the edge and achieve a pretty exciting 25 degree northerly tilt. We're hoping that the tilt and a power conserving winter plan will allow Spirit to survive the depths of a second Martian winter and go on to explore more of Mars come springtime.

The truth is, I really miss spending my time with the rovers, so I'm more than happy to come in on the weekend and get back into the guts of operations. It's also very cool that the many other people it takes to plan a rover drive sol are willing to come in on their days off to make this work. This is the second weekend in a row that the JPL engineers and the science staff came in to shepherd Spirit along. Big love to all of them!

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

2007-11-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

This week, I am up at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for a project science meeting for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LRO is our first step toward fulfilling the Vision, that is, gaining a foothold on the Moon and using it as a stepping stone toward explanding outward.

LRO is carrying seven instruments on board to look for water, understand the radiation environment, and acquire high-resolution information on topography, temperature, roughness, slopes, and imagery to characterize potential landing sites. At this point, the instruments are all built and undergoing individual acoustic, vibrational, and thermal vacuum testing. After they have been individually tested, they will be delivered to the spacecraft integrations center in the next two months. Then they will be integrated onto the spacecraft body and the whole thing will tested together.

LRO is scheduled for launch in 2008 on an Atlas V 401 rocket. No time to delay ops concepts or calibration for the cruise phase, as LRO takes a direct flight to the Moon in four days. The spaceraft spends a year in a circular polar orbit approximately 50 km above the Moon's surface, closer than any other lunar mission. During this time, it will be making global maps and acquiring observations for ESMD that they need to start planning for landing sites. After a year, control of the spacecraft will be turned over to science and while the spacecraft is still functional it will be used for science observations, possibly including a change of orbit to a more fuel-efficient elliptical orbit.

The LPRP at MSFC (where I work) is the program management office for LRO, Goddard manages the spacecraft, like integration and operations, and the seven instruments onboard all have individual principal investigators (PIs) and science teams. This makes LRO a much different flavor of space mission than, say, the Mars Exploration Rovers where we have a single PI and one coherent team. So, the project science meeting has been great for me to meet the team members (though I already know many of them of course), meet the management, and get instrument updates. The team spent a lot of time here discussing operations scenarios for when we actually get up there. There are some interesting ways of coordinating observations among instruments to make a richer science story than just simply leaving instruments switched on on a nadir-pointing orbit. But they take some time and agreement. We also spent some time thinking about how to co-register all the data together and tie it to the new reference frame that LOLA, the laser altimeter on LRO, will provide.

It definitely got me psyched for this mission, which we hope will be the first of many robotic missions to the Moon! But wait, why do we need LRO when there are three other international lunar orbiters, anyway? Next post, I'll tell you.

Returning to the Moon

2007-11-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, sorry for the extended hiatus. I took a new job at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center at the end of the summer and moved to Huntsville, AL in October. Wow! I can hardly believe it myself.

Initially, I'm here to support the Lunar Precursor Robotics Program. We'll have a new website soon that I'll point you to. We are currently serving as a conduit to understand what data the engineers need to get back to the Moon, and come up with some solutions to get them those data. We are the managers for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) missions, due to launch next year and return gobs of new data that will help address some engineering design issues (as well as new science of course). We are also developing an application called Lunar Mapping and Modeling, which will rapidly deliver these great new data to the users (engineers and scientists). I'm also here as a resource to other MSFC lunar activities, of which there are surprisingly many - the lunar impact monitoring group, the lunar simulant development effort, lunar dust and its effects work, and an interesting partnership with students in the UAH Mech E program to spend a semester designing a lunar lander mission. As if all that weren't enough, I'll also be working to build a lunar & planetary science group to do some great science in partnership with the opportunities afforded by exploration activities. You all know that the Moon is near and dear to my heart, so this is a very exciting opportunity for me to combine lunar science with my spacecraft experience and boundless enthusiasm to move lunar exploration forward!

Huntsville, AL is a completely pleasant community. It is powered by the Army's missile systems and Marshall's rocket propulsion, so it is full of aerospace industry branches, software and electronics companies, and other high-tech employers. It is a small town but populated by international and well-educated people. I'm already a member of a great NPR radio affiliate, the Huntsville Museum of Art, the Huntsville Botanical Gardens, a fantastic little pottery studio, and the amazing U.S. Space and Rocket Center (no, I never went to Space Camp). The photo above is the first one I took in Huntsville. It's a Saturn V rocket (replica) and the Moon. How cool is that ?! We also have a real Saturn V, but it is now exclosed in a protected building at the lower right of this photo. One of the greatest things about moving here is that the whole community is jazzed about the space program and going to the moon. When I meed people and tell them I am a lunar scientist, they are wowed and happy that I am here helping the program. It's pretty amazing support for me, my science, and my career actually. Let's go to the Moon!!!!!!!

Toe-dip

2007-09-12T10:19:00.000-06:00

Hi all, there's obviously lots going on that I'll need to catch you up on at some point. Both rovers are on the move again as the dust storms abate and they gain power back. Spirit is up on top of Home Plate finally, and heading south across the top. Opportunity is going into Victoria Crater!! We did a toe-dip maneuver on Monday, which was to assess the trafficability and the rover's ability to maneuver down the slope and to take pictures of what a good route down might be. Here's a tiny movie of the toe-dip navcam images that show all is well and we are excited!!

The record-holder (without steroids)

2007-08-10T12:41:00.000-06:00

Today, Spirit reaches Sol 1281, which matches the lifetime of the Viking II Lander (late 70s-early 80s) on the surface of Mars. Tomorrow it will be the all-time champion! And all on solar power! Go Spirit!

Both rovers have survived the worst part (we hope) of the current dust storms. The opacity of the air is no longer climbing, there are no new storms forming, and the solar power is holding steady. In the coming weeks and months we expect the dust to settle (though hopefuly not all on our solar panels) and activities will resume. It is a good thing the first storm gusts cleaned both rovers' solar panels! Opportunity is holding tight, keeping warm enough and keeping her batteries mostly charged. We've been able to do some atmospheric monitoring, but not much else. Spiritspide it's been more interesting.

Around sol 1257 the winds were howling at their worst. Here's an animation (from Larry Crumpler) of two microscopic images the rock Spirit has been parked over for the storm. It is a bit of silica-rich rock we've been trying to characterize, so it's light-toned and rough. The darker part is the dark basaltic soil and sand in the area. These two images were taken 7 minutes apart. If you look carefully, you can actually see sand grains moving around all over the place. Estimates of the wind velocity are between 60 and 70 miles per hour to get that type of motion on particles that large. (The images are 31 mm across, for scale).

We've also been monitoring the motion of sand on the ground. Here's an image in front of Spirit showing ripples crawling along and one behind Spirit showing her tracks get obliterated by the wind.

more web diversions

2007-07-31T09:29:00.001-06:00

No matter how many different tests I take, how many questions they have, or what the questions are, I always turn out INTJ. Sigh.

Dark days

2007-07-30T20:29:00.000-06:00

Despite my asking the HiRISE team to find and kill an apparent background process called HiOPACITY (heh, geek humor), the dust storms continue to give the rovers a tought time. Spirit experienced a record high tau of 4.738 on Sol 1265 with a corresponding solar array energy of 261 watt-hours. The most recent tau for Spirit on Sol 1269 was 4.322 with a solar array energy of 274 watt-hours.

Spirit still remains power positive, but things are tougher for Opportunity on the other side of the planet. Because we have been saving energy on Opportunity by not making science observations, the rover isn't generating waste heat. The waste heat normally goes into heating up the electronics box to keep the electronics warm. No activities means no waste heat means the temperature is dropping in the electronics box, about 1 degree C per sol. At a certain point, the rover will automatically turn on emergency heaters for the electronics, but they suck up a lot of power - power that Opportunity doesn't have right now. So we're now trying to strike a balance by having the rover stay on longer each sol to expend more heat, raising the electronics temperatures and avoiding the survival heater turn on. But the price is that the rover will now start draining power and risks tripping a low-power fault sometime during this plan.

When a low-power fault is tripped, the rover's systems take the batteries off-line putting the rover to sleep and then checking each sol to see if there is sufficient available energy to wake up and perform communications. If there is not sufficient power, Opportunity will stay asleep. Depending on the weather conditions Opportunity could stay asleep for days, weeks or even months, all the while trying to charge her batteries with whatever available sunlight there might be. At this point the ground team will be unable to help and Opportunity would be completely on her own. When skies clear Opportunity would wake up and service her normal communication passes (if within about 5 weeks) or listen each day to see if we are there trying to talk to her (if beyond about 5 weeks).

Oooooh, hang on little rover!!!!!!

Dust bedevils Mars

2007-07-14T19:34:00.000-06:00

I've been having a great couple of weeks with a MER team meeting and the 7th International Conference on Mars (ok, it was *about* Mars, not *on* Mars, sadly). A MER team meeting is a really fun thing to attend. First of all, the scientific team is pretty large, when you tally up the principal investigators, their postdocs and students, and technical staff support. We're spread out over the US, Canada, Germany, Denmark, and France, so we don't see each other much except for conferences. So a MER team meeting gives us all the chance to catch up on what we're all doing science-wise. Team members give talk about what they are thinking about these data on those rocks, or the results from those soil experiments we did, etc. and then everyone gets to ask whatever zany questions they think of. Unlike at a larger conference, people don't feel as self-conscious about thinking out loud, and it's a wonderful sounding board to toss ideas around and have the whole team's expertise brought to bear. Not surprisingly, the hot topic at this meeting were the high-silica story emerging near Home Plate. Do the high-Si rocks occur in conjunction with the high-sulfur soils? Are they remnants of fumaroles or hot springs? How could volcanic activity nearby at Home Plate have contributed? When did all these form? Could we be looking at the most habitable place on Mars we've ever seen? Fun stuff!

While the science team was debating, the rovers weren't doing very much. For the last couple of weeks, there have been some massive dust storms on Mars, accompanied by some alarmist headlines, like "Martian dust storm could destroy rovers" and "Mars dust storms suck life out of rovers". Yes, it's scary for our little dudes, but they're not dead yet. Check out this JPL video discussing the storms and the mission.

Dust storms on Mars are a common thing. They actually appear in cycles, every few years there seems to be a period of increased dust storm activity, and sometimes the entire planet can be enveloped by swirling dust. The storms start when the ground and atmosphere heat up during the change of seasons. This thermal energy causes winds to blow, and the wind lofts the fine Martian dust. The individual storms can be long-lived, similar to hurricanes on Earth, where an individual storm can last for weeks.

Underneath the storm, sunlight is blocked from entering by the opaque dust. In the image above, you can see the sky over Opportunity get darker and darker. This is a problem for the rovers, because they generate their own power using solar panels. Fully clean solar panels on each rover can generate about 800 Watt-hours per sol. That's enough to light one 100-watt light bulb for 8 hours. That is also enough to operate all our tiny instruments that look at the sky and the ground, drill into rocks, and measure elements and minerals. The dust storms have reduced the amount of sunlight getting to the ground to something like 1% of normal, so that diminishes the rovers' ability to generate energy for themselves.

In terms of science, it's perfectly ok for us to give the little dudes a break and tell them just to sit tight until the storms dissipate. Of course, we are anxious, with Opportunity perched right on the edge of Victoria Crater and Spirit just about to drive up onto Home Plate, but we want these vehicles to continue to work so we don't have to push them. The real issue is how much power does it take to stay alive? The Martian surface is really really cold, which is really really bad for electronic parts. The fear is that if the rovers don't have enough power to keep their heaters on, the electronics will freeze and break, and then it's anyone's guess whether we can still operate them. Fortunately, for Opportunity, which is experiencing the worst of it, it is the height of summer (warm), near the equator (warm), and under an insulating dust blanket (warm), so the amount of power it needs to stay warm is significantly less than it might be at other times. The engineering and science teams worked hard last week to make a low-power plan for Opportunity, where it just tries to keep itself warm, and we had telemetry today that indicates it is working well. Unfortunately, we'll only hear from the rover every 3 days or so, so that keeps everyone on edge.

But other Mars missions are on the case. You can see images of the dust cover and storm activity with THEMIS and MARCI. Also some people are actually interested in dust storms on Mars and for them they've got their instruments going full blast. We're just keeping our fingers crossed for the weather and working hard on the ground to keep this mission going a little while longer.

Dust devils on Mars and New Mexico

2007-06-25T04:16:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the hiatus - I'm traveling quite a bit this summer. This week, literally jet-setting at the JETSET summer school in the Açores, where R is one of the invited lecturers and I'm just tagging along for the week. We're on São Miguel Island, it's raining, he's lecturing, and I'm working. Later in the week we'll have a look around at the volcanic features of this island, which is one of several here at the triple junction of the African, Eurasian, and North American plates in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. North America, Europe and Africa are all moving away from each other and spreading is occuring along the rifts in between the plates - producing the volcanoes that make up the Açores. All of the islands are still geologically active; the last eruption on São Miguel was in the 1600s. There are hot springs and other geothermal features here, plus the islands get much of their energy from geothermal plants - how cool is that?!

While I've been traveling around, Spirit has been putzing around the northeastern part of Home Plate. We traversed up the side to get the stratigraphy, then came down again to revisit the silica-rich targets of Silica Valley - as shown in this false-color image, the nubby Si-rich rocks seem to be underlying the valley rather extensively. I know those of you following along at home see pictures of Home Plate, then Silica Valley, then Home Plate, then back again, etc. and it's probably hard to figure out what the team is planning to do! Truthfully, the plan is guided by what the rover sees and how long it takes the team to process the information. So while we have a long-term plan to get up on top of Home Plate and head south, we keep seeing interesting things nearby and want to take the time to investigate them before leaving the area permanently. Better to backtrack 10m now then miss out on important science later!

But putzing around one area has had its benefits - particularly lying in wait for dust devils. Both rovers regularly monitor the Martian atmosphere, like little weather stations on the surface. They keep track of the opacity of the atmosphere by seeing how much light is let in at specific times of day and the team can translate that into how much dust is in the atmosphere. They have sequences that look for clouds in the Martian mornings. We are also tracking the percentage of argon in the atmosphere, which is related to atmospheric pressure - a funny thing about Mars is that the atmospheric pressure is small, so when carbon dioxide condenses or sublimes at the polar caps, the entire atmosphere deflates or inflates a little bit, changing the percrntage of other gases like argon. Most interesting on a day-to-day basis are the dust devils, which are small vortices of hot air rising from the ground and carrying fine particles of dust and sand. Here's a great article about dust devils on Mars.

Because the atmosphere is thin, the dust devils don't have a lot of pressure in them, so they can't do anything like tip the rovers over. But they can blow dust around - and off the solar panels of the rover as seen in this true-color image of Spirit's solar panel from sol 1231! The solar panels on the rover are flat to be able to catch maximum sun rays. But this also means dust settles on them from normal operations. The design team know this would happen and in fact it was one of the contributing factors to the expected rover lifetime - that the solar panels would dust up and not be able to generate any more power. But unexpected dust devils have come along every so often and blown the dust off of both rovers and allowed them to keep on generating energy for themselves. Spirit hasn't had its solar panels cleaned since sol 420, more than two Earth years ago, and was pretty dirty. But in the last few weeks, Spirit has been buffeted by at least two dust devils and is now generating as much power as her frequently-cleaned sister, Opportunity. In fact, because of a large dust storm on Mars affecting Opportunity, this week Spirit is actually outperforming Opportunity in energy generation!

To people living in the American southwest, dust devils are a familiar sight and form in the same way as on Mars, though because of the denser atmosphere, terrestrial dust devils aren't necessarily gentle. I had the good fortune recently to witness a highly unusual dust devil phenomenon about 10 km from my own house! The rising warm air from the ground forms the dust devil funnel, and the sinking cold air from the low-hanging clouds gets sucked into the vortex, creating a full funnel cloud. R and I witnessed this for about 15 minutes, seeing the dust on the ground rise up toward the clouds and the peculiar limb-darkening of the upper funnel. The ground speed was only about 60 mph and it did no damage, unlike a true tornado (fortunately for me and my tornado-phobia!). Eventually the ground funnel moved so far from the connecor in the clouds that the thin funnel broke apart and the whole thing collapsed. I'll never forget one of the things I learned in Randy Jokipii's planetary physics class during my first semester of grad school - the mathematics of vortex formation are such that they are impossible to start, but once started are impossible to stop - and are therefore, by nature, random events. Cool!

Water on Mars?

2007-06-12T19:59:00.000-06:00

Hey Science Girl, any comments on this story? Sure, my comment is: don't believe it - it was retracted, chiefly because the rocks in the photos are actually on the inside of a crater on a 20-30 degree slope. Scientists can make mistakes. But it does bring up a good opportunity to talk about false-color images!

Many of the rover pictures, and other planetary photos, appear in "false color." We're used to looking with our eyes and seeing all the colors at once. But you've done the experiment where you pass light through a prism and make a rainbow, right? That shows you that the light we see, whether in a source like the sun or reflected off objects, is made of light of many wavelengths. Something that looks green to your eye is reflecting a lot of 510-nanometer light back to you (green), and not so much 650-nanometer light (red). The MER camera - Pancam - only sees one color at a time. Basically, it has filters that only let a specific wavelength of light through, so it takes a grayscale photo showing the intensity of the scene in one color - or filter - at a time. The Pancam has 13 different filters, which means it can see the scene in 13 different wavelengths. Some of the wavelengths are familiar to us, like blue and red, and others are beyond human vision, like infrared.

When we humans get the data, each photo is a grayscale image taken at a different wavelength. If we had an infinite number of filters that covered the whole visible spectrum, we could combine them into what our eyes would see. But instead we have to be a little more clever and combine the filters in combinations to approximate what our eyes would see. These are called "approximate true color" or "true color" images. When you look at Mars in true color, you see that it's pretty much red. The rocks are red, the soil is red, the dust is red, even blueberries are red. It's pretty hard to make out differences in true color. So, we get tricky and make "false-color" images, where we combine filters in ways the eye would never see in order to bring out differences among rocks and soils and features. For example, many geologic features are distinct in the Pancam filters L2, L5 and L7, which correspond to wavelengths of 753, 535, and 432 nm, or infrared, greenish-yellow, and indigo. These get combined so L2 represents red, L5 represents green, and L7 represents blue - meaning that much of the visible red wavelengths that dominate all of Mars are missing in this representation and the blues become more prominent.

Now let's look at the photo in the article again, knowing now it is in false color (L257 actually). The blue in this photo means the material reflects more 432 nm light than 535 and 753 nm light, making it appear blue. We can't tell from this image whether our eye would actually see it as some other color. In fact, when we look at the true-color images of the area where this picture comes from (Burns Cliff), we can see that in fact, the "blue" stuff in the cracks reflects a LOT of red light, appearing reddish brown when we're able to collect images using the red filter. We can also see the slope of the area, making it impossible for water to pool.

False-color images are really useful for a couple of reasons. They allow us to take less data and still have a reasonable sampling of the target in wavelenghts that span our available filters. They allow us to discriminate more readily amonf the reddish rocks of Mars, including the famous blueberries, which are actually grayish-red hematite. And, when combined in less intuitive ways, they can make some really spectacular and colorful and amazing views of another planet.

Silica Valley

2007-06-08T17:37:00.000-06:00

You might have seen this Press Release last week describing a little patch of soil that turned out to be a really incredible find. Since Spirit's right front wheel stopped working, the rover drives backwards dragging the stuck wheel around. When there's soft soil or dust, this effectively digs a small trench and churns up subsurface material. Most times, the soil on Mars (that's soil in the planetary sense - no organics like soil on Earth) is pretty uniform and looks the same from place to place to place. Sometimes though, Spirit has turned up light-colored material like Tyrone, Arad, and Paso Robles. Those bright materials have turned out to be sulfate salts - generally Ca-sulfate (gypsum) - which forms on Earth as a precipitate from liquid water. Those deposits show us that liquid water played a role here in the soils somehow, maybe as a shallow lake or ephemeral playa (not too different from New Mexico actually).

As we headed to Home Plate, Spirit's wheel churned up another bright patch. By this point, most of the team wasn't freaking out about every white patch and it was actually the APXS team leader who pointed it out and asked for a picture. When we looked at it in Pancam color and with the Mini-TES, it was immediately clear it was something new. The Mini-TES is a remote-sensing instrument that collects light in the near-infrared spectrum, beyond where our eyes can see. The TES stands for Thermal Emission Spectrometer. You've probably seen infrared cameras on TV, and we just had someone come up and image our home in infrared to detect water leaks, and the TES works in a siliar way - it passively collects thermal emission from the objects around it. The shape of the thermal emission spectrum reflects the mineralogy of the rock, so we use Mini-TES to remotely sense the mineral makeup of nearby rocks. When Mini-TES looked at the white patch, it showed something totally new - the presence of free SiO2.

SiO2 is silica or silicon dioxide, better known on Earth as quartz, sand, opal, chert, amethyst, jasper, or agate, just to name a few. If you're a rockhound, you know that quartz minerals form where there's lots of water, like fluids flowing through a vein or vapors depositing on springs. We took better Mini-TES spectra to distinguish what form the SiO2 was in and it looks most like opal, which means the SiO2 is not like quartz crystals but rather kind of amorphous, more like deposits found at hot springs. So that's not to say there was a hot spring here, but since we're right next to Home Plate - a structure we think was caused by hot lava interacting with groundwater - we really think they might be linked!

OK, that's cool you think, but why the heck do we need to put a press release every time there's something that might be water-related? Well, first it *is* kind of cool. No other mission has ever found anything like SiO2, even though it's been speculated to exist for decades. Second, remember that this continues to be a publicly-funded mission and continues to fullfill its objectives. Every public program needs to report its progress - you can be cynical in saying it's to continue to get funding, and while obviously I adore working on this mission, I would find funding somewhere else, so I'll take the non-cynical view that we have an enthusiasm as well as an obligation in reporting to the public all the good things we're doing, as do all missions.

When the heck are you going into Victoria Crater already?!?!

2007-05-23T12:56:00.000-06:00

OK, I've gotten that question more than once - in hallways, by email, on the phone. You've probably noticed on the rover traverse maps that Opportunity got to the dark streaks, then turned around and headed back past the Valley Without Peril. No, the valley did not live up to its name, presenting some very steep slopes that were a little bit scary to contemplate. We're headed back the way we came, to the very first valley called Duck Bay. Still no guarantees we'll go in - depends on a thorough assessment of the rover's health and the safety situation when we arrive - but the tentative plan is to make a "toe-dip" into the crater there, as the gently-sloping valley appears to be lined with bedrock for some ways into the crater.

Of course, when we arrived here at this huge hole in the ground, like all good adventurers we immediately want to leap into it. But in the trek around Victoria Crater, we've learned tons about the crater and its interior and sharpened our idea of what science can only be done by entring into the crater. For instance, this and other gorgeous Pancam images show that the bottom of the crater is covered with rippled black sand. Big sand dunes are unfriendly rover territory, as exampled by Purgatory Dune where Opportunity was stuck for 5 weeks in 2005. So, driving across the bottom of the crater is right out. But, then we went over to where that dark sand is streaming out of the crater and examined it from a safe vantage point. So we got the science along with the safety in that case.

One of the more visibly fascinating things to see is the rock that makes up the cliff faces of the crater rim, like above in one of my favorite false-color images. We think it is pretty clear that the stuff at the top is normal Meridiani surface rocks, jumbled up as ejecta blocks. But then there's some thin and thick layering, followed by spectacularly crossbedded rocks underneath those. Crossbedding is an indicator of sedimentary processes operating in a fluid environment (here I'm using fluid to mean either wind or water, can't tell which yet) forming dunes and ripples. I was going to try to explain it more, but here's a *fantastic* animation showing how crossbeds form. Though it would be da bomb to drive up to the crossbeds and put the Microscopic Imager right on them, we don't want the rover to tumble to its death extending a giant lever arm on a slope. So, we're doing a lot of what's called superresolution imaging of the cliff faces - taking multiple images from the same location but offset a fraction of a pixel. This allows you to combine the information and subsample below the pixel size, sharpening up edges in the image. We're getting some fantastic views of the stratigraphy this way.

But still, everyone wants to go into the crater, of course! The one thing we can't do anywhere else is understand the relationships between mineralogy, chemistry, texture, and physical properties of the rocks (like hardness or flakiness) in situ. That's why the paved valley of Duck Bay is extra attractive. When Opportunity went into Endurance Crater, we stopped to examine all the rock layers going in, leaving a trail of RAT holes behind. We hope we can do something similar here at Victoria if we get the ok to go in, so stay with us on our trek back!

What is up with the lunar robotic program?

2007-05-16T20:56:00.000-06:00

Check out this great explanation of the state of the lunar robotic program from InterplanetSarah. I couldn't agree more - if Congress wants NASA to explore the Moon, Congress needs to give NASA the money to do so, and then let NASA do it. LRO will go in 2009 and human landings are scheduled for 2018 - what will we be doing at the moon in the interim? It's the perfect opportunity to show we can land on another planet robotically and retrieve samples, and learn more about the environment we're sending humans into to boot.

Meteorite Mania: the followup

2007-05-15T12:51:00.000-06:00

This week, we find out that the object that crashed through that house in New Jersey is not a meteorite. When a test for nickel was conducted at the American Museum of Natural History, it turned out to be made of a human-made stainless steel alloy. So, density and magnetism are good indicators for meteorite, but they are also properties of many, many chunks of rock, ore, and slag here on Earth.

In fact, the most definitive test of the meteoritic origin of metal is the nickel content. When the Earth differentiated, forming a crust, mantle, and core, nearly all the iron, nickel, gold, platinum, and other metallic elements went into the core. That's why there aren't big chunks of metal in the crust. The metal we get through ores is in small quantities and usually collected in mineral form, which is why they are scarce and valuable. The process of smelting can convert the ore iron into its metallic form, but there won't be any nickel associated with it. Now, the same differentition happened on some large asteroids - but the iron meteorites come from the asteroid core itself, where all the metals went. So the iron in meteorites contains a lot of nickel - usually 5% but up to 35% - plus traces of lots of other metals. No rock on Earth has all the metals wrapped up into one. Even further, the iron and nickel in some iron meteorites cooled slowly from the molten state and formed two different minerals, kamacite (low-Ni) and taenite (high-Ni), and you can see these mineral crystals in the meteorite when you etch a cut surface (called Widmanstatten pattern). No rocks but meteorites have slowly-cooled Fe,Ni minerals in them. But to be able to tell Ni content and Widmanstatten pattern, you need to open the rock up and run some tests on it. So density and magnetism aren't the whole story.

Want more information on how you can tell if you have a meteorite? Glad you asked. Also, see more about metal in meteorites, including nice photos.

Meteorite mania

2007-05-10T10:19:00.000-06:00

OK, here's a couple of meteorite topics for today:

Did a meteorite fall from the recent Kansas tornado? I have a pretty intense tornado-phobia, so my heart goes out to the residents of Greensburg, Kansas and everyone who is helping them recover from the massive tornado that struck this week. But tornadoes have nothing to do with meteorites. In this case, part of the massive Brenham pallasite, which was found nearby in 1949, was on display in the Greensburg Big Well Museum. The Museum was one of the buildings destroyed in the massive tornado, but contrary to some reports out there that the 1000-lb Brenham chunk was blown away and recovered east of Greensburg or in some farmer's field, the meteorite was in fact recovered in the rubble of the destroyed museum building. No flying meteorites associated with the tornado.

Riddle me this Science Girl: What is up with the meteorite that crashed into the house in New Jersey? Hmm, I was out in the frozen wasteland when this happened, but it was apparently thought to be a meteorite that week by the group at Rutgers. The news articles only say that the Rutgers group considered the density and magnetism of the sample and haven't been able to do a definitive test for nickel concentration, the true fingerprint of an iron meteorite, so there may be more news coming. Up to 100 fist-sized meteorites fall to Earth every year, so that part isn't unusual. The majority of meteorites that fall are ordinary chondrites, so a falling iron is unusual. The chances of a meteorite falling into a piece of your property are remote - there's only a few accounts of that ever happening anywhere. So though the meteorite itself may not be scientifically spectacular, the circumstances (fresh fall, iron meteorite, human interest story) are highly unusual and are likely to drive the price up for collectors (the piece of crap car that was hit by the Peekskill meteorite went on tour and eventually sold for $12K!).

Finally, I've very pleased to announce our new UNM Meteorite Museum web pages, including a Virtual Tour of our collection, photos of hand specimens and thin sections, tons of information about meteorites and their parent bodies, and links to our collections catalog. The information level is aimed pretty low because our physical audience at the Museum is mostly gradeschool field trips, but you might find it interesting anyway!

Science results at Home Plate

2007-05-09T17:44:00.000-06:00

Last week, we published the results of last fall's science campaign at Home Plate, including the evidence for and against a couple of our hypotheses for its formation - see the Science article here (most people need a subscription to download the full article online, but you can also visit your library or bookstore to see it in print). I love alphabetical order sometimes - I get to be 4th author on this Athena team publication :)

If you've been following along, you'll already know we think it is a volcanic feature formed when lava met wet terrain, like a maar volcano (hey! Maars on Mars!). If lava interacts with groundwater, the water can flash into steam and make shallow eruptions. These eruptions don't make normal volcanic cones, but looke like low rings or craters. Zuni Salt Lake in New Mexico is a well-preserved example of a maar, which is why it was a stop on our MER field trip last summer. Check out team intern Megan Ennis' terrific poster comparing Zuni Salt Lake to Home Plate to see some of the interesting and diagnostic features of each.

It's good to keep an open mind among the team, though, and we're doing all a lot of new work with the rover to look for more evidence that would help us rule scenarios in or out. For instance, one of the things many people find compelling is this photo, which shows a dark rock and some apparently bending layers. To many, this is a bomb sag, formed when the lighter rock was still wet or deformable, and the dark rock got plunked down onto the layers, bending them under it like when you sit on a soft chair. I'm still a little skeptical though - to me the dark rock looks like the other dark rocks in this frame, which might be weathering out of the light rock or might just be rolled onto the light rock later. We can't tell which from this photo and we didn't have time last fall to investigate more thoroughly. It would be great to find another example like this one!

We are planning a throrough characterization of the rocks as we guide Spirit up the side of Home Plate in the next couple of weeks. And then we've got an exciting area ahead of us - the Home Plate surface itself! We just scooted on by as we headed for Winter Haven and we're all anxious to get on up there and check it out.

IDD bonanza at Home Plate

2007-04-26T20:33:00.000-06:00

This week, I've been working with Spirit as it investigates the eastern side of Home Plate. Home Plate is turning out to be super-cool in a science kind of way. Every outcrop we get close to turns out to be a gem. In these last few weeks, we've deployed the instrument arm (IDD) onto several rocks called Elizabeth_Mahon, Madeleine_English, and Examine_This, plus a light-colored soil near Madeleine_English. The instrument arm holds the RAT, the Microscopic Imager, the APXS, and the Mossbauer spectrometer, and we've put all of them to good use.

I've already explained that Mossbauer spectroscopy determines the kinds of iron-bearing minerals in the rock. The APXS is the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer. It works by exposing the rock target to a source of alpha particles and X-rays and then measuring the alpha particles and X-rays that come back. Each element interacts with X-rays differently, the X-ray interaction depends on the electron shells of an atom. When an atom is hit with an X-ray, the atom can absorb the energy by having one of its electrons go to an excited state. The excited state is unstable, so the electron will want to come back down and when it does, the atom emits energy. The exact frequency of the emitted energy is specific to the flavor of the atom - that is, the exact element. Therefore, you can look at a specific frequency and count the number of returned X-rays and know how much of that element is in the target. In practice, the MER APXS looks at a whole spectrum of frequencies returned and we pick out the peaks at specific energies to say how much of each element is in the rock. Unlike Mossbauer, which is tuned to iron, APXS detects the amount of every element in the rock. But APXS doesn't tell us anything about how those elements are combined into minerals. So, we like to use the APXS and Mossbauer on the same rock to get both the elemental makeup and the mineralogy.

APXS and Mossbauer spectra aren't much to look at unless you're a geek who likes squiggles on graphs (ok, I admit I like them). But this week we also found a nice flat rock exposure that we could brush with the RAT. The Rock Abrasion Tool grinding bit on Spirit wore out long ago, but it still has fantastic wire bristles that can brush soil away. Check out these before and after hazcam shots of the rock, the RAT brush, and placing the APXS on the brushed spot. The RAT brush spot is the spectacular shining beacon in the middle left. (I made this using gifninja.com.)

Then we looked at the shining beacon of brushed rock close-up. I mean REALLY close up. Here's the Microscopic Imager mosaic of the brushed spot, which is about 3cm across. Though it's a mostly flat-ish rock, it's got a knobby texture that we're still discussing. Compare this texture with what we saw at Madeleine_English, described below.

Test your Visual DNA

2007-04-25T11:02:00.000-06:00

Yup, another Doc day.

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

Spinning wheels

2007-04-15T10:51:00.000-06:00

Spirit is on the east side of Home Plate, which is this raised platform-like structure that we're trying to understand. It could be some kind of volcanic structure, possibly formed by hot lava inteacting with groundwater, and it would be the first volcanic feature either rovers or landers have gotten to investigate. Because the surface of Mars is largely volcanic, it's important for us to understand the processes of volcanism and so we're trying to do a really full-up investigation of Home Plate.

Our next target is called Madeleine_English (the team is informally naming targets after deceased members of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, complementing the names from the Negro Leagues on HP's west side last fall) and is a really interesting target for understanding Home Plate. It is pretty obviously a layer of rock, near the bottom of the stack of layers that make up Home Plate. We'd really like to understand what the different layers are made of and how they are put together. We got to take a look at Madeleine_English a couple of days ago in all 13 glorious Pancam filters (you can see the pictures filter by filter, like here, or combined to make the true-color filter combination at left) and the results are intriguing, showing a very interesting texture in the rock.

So all this week, Spirit and her handlers tried valiantly to approach Madeleine_English so we could deploy the arm instruments. Unfortunately, we're really feeling the effects of having a gimpy wheel. During these short drives over rough terrain angling for a precise approach, the rover has to strain against the wheel, because the wheel doesn't rotate freely. But as I've said here before, the rover drivers are amazing at coaxing the rover into places to wring more science out of this planet. Here's their summary of the driving maneuver to get to this target: "The route involves driving backward, turning around, backing up, parking in parallel between two sizable rocks flanking the target, pivoting clockwise on the stuck right front wheel, and finally "crabbing" forward to the target. Spirit performs crabbing by steering the two rear wheels toward the stuck right front wheel, thus opposing resistance from the right front wheel and keeping yawing (swinging from side to side) to a minimum." (You can see weekly summaries of rover activities in the JPL Mission Manager reports)

Whew! Check out where Spirit ended up (through her front hazcam). Sweet! That's the target rock right in front of us! Can't wait to have a closer look!

An APXS / MB observation in every plan, a chicken in every pot

2007-04-06T20:30:00.000-06:00

That was my campaign promise when I took on the role of Keeper of the Plan. This is a science team job in the daily planning process that puts together the plan of activities that science wants that day and hands it off to the engineering team. I love it because it's detail-oriented, like me, and because it's another one of those jobs that gets me working with the engineers, which I love. Anyway, I had facetiously said that because I was the one putting activities into the plan, I could slip in my favorite ones - which of course, I can't do - both because obviously we do what the team wants every day but also because of the huge issue that my favorite instruments, APXS and MB, are on the end of the long rover arm and I can't personally command that to move too.

But this week, I had the distinct pleasure of *almost* making my campaign promise come true. This week, both rovers got down and dirty, putting their instruments on the ground. Opportunity is working on a week-long campaign to characterize the "dark streaks" emanating from Victoria Crater. The way we decided to do this was to first go to a spot between two streaks that looked "normal" and then go to the place with the darkest soil. On both spots, we did a whole series of observations, including photometry (photographs at different times of day on the same sopt to see how the soils' spectral characteristics change with sun angle), Microscopic Imager photos (to see what the soils look like on a fine scale, are there blueberries, is the sand different sizes, etc.), and APXS (to get the composition of the soil).

Spirit worked all week on characterizing Elizabeth Mahon, an outcrop of light-toned rock near Home Plate that may be in-place exposures of the lowest stratigraphic unit - exciting for geologists, really! Spirit spent a week on this one outcrop, largely because of the time it takes to conduct Mossbauer observations. We did four days (96 hours!) of Mossbauer on this rock. Mossbauer works by inducing a response from iron in the rock and then detecting its spectrum. To induce the transition in the iron, the Mossbauer carries a little source, and that source is getting old and weak. In the beginning of the mission, we only needed half a day or a day of Mossbauer integration to understand the iron mineralogy of the target. With each new day of the mission, we need to spend longer and longer to get a good spectrum. Because this rock is an important one for understanding the geology of Home Plate, we made the commitment to get a really good Mossbauer analysis here, plus APXS data for elemental composition and Microscopic Imager photos of the rock itself - which show it's an interesting, irregular, windscuplted rock. MI images are pretty cool - here are some of the Elizabeth Mahon shots this one and another one, or go check them all out!

What to do while Doc-ing

2007-04-02T15:44:00.000-06:00

Today, I spent the majority of the day as documentarian for Opportunity. One of the team members has described this activity as like watching paint dry. I line it though - it really keeps me in touch with what is going on with the rover activities. Opportunity just finished some in-depth observations of a valley into Victoria Crater called the Valley Without Peril and now the team has to evaluate whether the valley lives up to its optimistic name! The capes and valleys as we circumnavigate Victoria are named after places Magellan visited on his circumnavigation of the globe.

But, being Doc means there's a lot of sort-of-dead time, when the engineering team is hard at work. That's when I catch up on my web surfing. A couple of weeks ago I visited my alma mater, Stony Brook and drove upstate to see my family. I used to love that drive, crossing Long Island, from the New Englandiness of Suffolk to the suburbs of Nassau and then coming up on the spectacular city vista with bridges and buildings all lit up. Then, the tree-lined parkways north to the Thruway and the wide open spaces of the Catsills and Hudson River Valley. Ahhhh, New York. What about you?

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
Boston
The Inland North
North Central
The South
The West
The Midland
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

You rate 89% New Yorker!

For scores between 85% and 100%: Superb job! Outstanding! A true-blue New Yorker! Maybe you should consider running for governor. Excelsior, dude!

Are You a New Yorker?
Make Your Own Quiz

You are 92% native to New York State.

Not only are you native to the state of New York, you probably have been to Albany more often than to NYC. You must have aced your Regents exam or used GOOGLE. You have probably tried a Speidie, and Dinosaur BBQ. You know that there is way more to New York than the "city".

Are you A New Yorker?... not city.
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Done travelling - back to Mars!

2007-03-29T14:34:00.000-06:00

Hi everyone, my apologies for not getting back to blogging til now. Thanks for all your emails encouraging me to get back to it!

First, we had a terrific and productive season with the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (blog archive is here). The reconnaissance team collected 176 specimens and the systematic team a little less than 700. We on recce had some of the worst weather of any season, spending only part of 12 days collecting meteorites. But the ones we did get were *quality* and we're very much looking forward to finding out what they are!

Second, I've been travelling since getting back from that. All over, for Mars, the Moon, and all the planets at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It's been a hectic but fun month and a half, but I'm very much looking forward to being home with my partner and my cat for a good long while.

Third, what's new with our little friends Spirit and Opportunity? Fortunately for me, they kept chugging right through my time away and presented plenty of work on my return (the engineering team didn't even realize I was gone?!). Today, we are planning Opportunity's 1130th sol, still hanging out at Victoria Crater. We're all itching for the chance to go down into it, but the team exhibits restraint and has a multiple-week plan ahead addressing some safety issues and conducting some science at the rim. There are these weird dark streaks emanating from the crater's western rim that we think are basaltic sand being blown up and out of the crater. There are big sand dunes at the crater bottom, so maybe it is the same sand? It's an interesting effect and something we're going over to check out. We also have to get lots more ground-based imaging to assess things like slopes and trafficability to make sure we can get the rover out of wherever we decide to go in. I haven't spent as much time on the Spirit side since I've been back, partly because it's been so busy that there's so much more to catch up with! Spirit's been on the move pretty much nonstop since leaving Winter Haven in December, checking out many many cool rocks associated with Home Plate. The team seems to be converging on a volcanic origin, but the details still elude us and we're siccing the rover on that task.

The rim of Victoria Crater has been the site for some of the most spectacular imaging of the mission - certainy in the time I've been involved. There's beautiful layering in the crater rim and we're trying to get imagery at many points along the rim to correlate the layers around the crater and to get information on what the surface might have looked like before the crater formed. There's a breccia at the top, probably ejecta from the crater forming, followed by apparently in-place layers of bedrock varying in albedo, color, and details like crossbedding. Check out the stunning Pancam mosiacs on the Pancam web page and tell me you don't drool.

It wasn't a rock, it was a rock lobster!

2006-11-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

I'm spending my last days on Mars for a while this week as I prepare to heard to Antarctica this Saturday! You can follow the exploits of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites over at the ANSMET weblog.

Just as I'm leaving, things are warming up in the Inner Basin and Spirit is getting the chance to stretch a little and look at some of the rocks and soil targets around her. She's looking at the white soil the wheels churned up on the way to where she is now. The white soils usually mean some kind of salt, and that usually means involvement of water. We're also looking at a rock layer that protrudes from Low Ridge like a fin. You can floow it all along the ridge to the rover. We tried to get the rover to move to break a piece off, but the sandy area where we are prevented the rover from doing that. Next week, we hope to actually drive a couple of meters to a basaltic rock and do a nice campaign there, looking at the vesicles (holes caused by escaping gas) in the rock and a detailed chemical analysis to see if these kinds of rocks are related to Home Plate. Then, it'll be off to Home Plate itself, a tantalizing feature we only zipped past last fall.

Opportunity has begun circumnavigating Victoria Crater, and every day there's a new, breathtaking vista. The team hasn't yet decided how far to go or when to try to go into the crater, so it's difficult for me to leave now knowing Opportunity could dive in at any time!

While you're missing me on this blog, keep up on what the rovers are doing through Steve Squyres' mission update, sites by passionate amateurs: MartianSoil, Mars Rover Blog and MarsGeo, and of course, the latest images direct from Mars are easily accessible from the Exploratorium web pages.

For other burning questions about all things planetary, spend some time at Planetary Science Research Discoveries, a fantastic site with very readable articles about current science.

Happy Holidays, everyone, and see you in February!

And still more on the Moon

2006-11-21T08:48:00.000-07:00

Yikes. Here I am, trying to cram in all the work I have to do before leaving for Antarctica this Saturday, and the darn people out there get me talking about my favorite topic, the Moon.

"Riddle me this Science Girl: Does the moon have magnetic fields? I read somewhere that one problem with putting an outpost on the moon will be shielding astronauts from radiation. Is this true? I also read that future lunar missions would be longer than the Apollo program, but that they would not run into lunar night. Does being on the surface of the moon during lunar night bring about special problems for astronauts and jet setting planetary scientists? I hate to bring up the whole digging thing again, but what about putting in a subterranean bunker? I am just curious; after all, the new JB movie is out and "Moonraker" was one of my favorites! Are there natural caves on the moon? What about unnatural ones?"

The Moon doesn't have its own magnetic field like the Earth does. The Earth's magnetic field comes (very basically) from its spinning liquid core. No spinning liquid core in the Moon = no magnetic field. There are some rocks on the lunar surface that are magnetized though - these might have been magnetized by large, ancient impact events in some weird way of physics I won't even try to get into. Anyway, the upshot is that the Apollo astronauts were very lucky. They received low-level doses of radiation during their sorties, which is entirely recoverable, but by pure luck, did not encounter a solar flare that would have really dosed them. Now that we understand both the lunar radiation environment and the effects of radiation on humans better, you can bet there's a lot more work going into how to deal with this issue.

I have a great T-shirt that says, "I'm taking a lunar day off." Would be nice! A lunar day is a month long - the time it takes from full moon (which would be high noon if you stood on the near side) to full moon. So if you're on the surface, you've got pretty much 2 weeks of sunlight and 2 weeks of darkness. On the Earth, our atmosphere does a lot to keep our temperatures even. Think of cloudy nights that are warmer than clear nights, or the fact that when you're in the desert, the days can be very hot but the nights a lot colder because of the clear dry air. On the Moon, there's no atmosphere, so you've got the sun beating down on you during the day (surface temperature +100C) and absolute darkness at night (surface temperature -150C). So whether you plan your surface sortie during the day or the night, you have some extreme temperatures to deal with. It would be extra difficult to try to plan for both extremes during a single sortie.

What can you do to protect against both radiation and temperature extremes? A subsurface habitat will have a constant temperature equal to the Moon's mean surface temperature (-23°C) and protect against radiation and solar flares. People have speculated on how to construct these kinds of things for decades, and some people want to build habitats in lava tubes, the only kind of natural cave on the Moon. But don't expect to see them anytime soon. Excavating and building subsurface modules are the kinds of incredibly expensive architechture you'd be looking at for permanent bases, not for sorties like we're currently planning.

More about the Moon

2006-11-06T11:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a comment I got recently: "We can also place a huge telescope on the moon which could replace the aging Hubble telescope. Would that not give us better resolution at greater distances? Or is this a waste of time due to the moon's orbit?" Actually, I thought this was prety obvious too, until our committee meeting a couple of weeks ago. The Moon certainly provides less atmosphere, so that's good, and the Moon's orbit is no big deal - remember that the Earth turns every 24 hours, so telescopes need to track on Earth anyway. Some people think you can get bigger collectors as well on the Moon, though a variety of techniques. But, the Moon has a lot of disadvantages too. It's still got dirt and gravity, which are inhibitors for large telescopes - gravity because you still need to build a big structure to hold and point the telescope, and dirt because it gets onto your collecting surface. Since the success of the Hubble mission, we've come to realize that there are great advantages for telescopes in free space that surpass even the Moon as the best platform. So, yes, there are some astronomy applications for which the Moon would be useful (like low-frequency radio astronomy), but for many, the advantages just aren't there. Here's a current article in Physics Today describing the pros and cons from two different points of view. The community's view on this is changing even in just the last year or two, so beware of older articles!

Another part of the comment is: "We could slowly develop mining on the moon using the iron and ore to build and launch future space missions." Well, yes and no. In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) on the Moon is a hot topic and many people are working in this area - they even holdan ISRU conference every year. One of the obvious ISRU uses is, of course, to support astronauts, bases, and continued missions. But, the Moon's resources are not like the Earth's. Here on Earth, many metals are concentrated in ore deposits. To make an ore deposit, you need a source, a transport mechanism, and a concentration mechanism or trap (hmmm, not unlike meteorites!). On Earth, by far the most common way to get these is by moving metal around in water, or less commonly, through igneous and metamorphic processes (for more, see the wiki on ore genesis). The Moon has been bone-dry since it formed and doesn't have plate tectonics, so both these major modes of ore formation are inoperable on the Moon, and there's no chance that we'll find metal deposits to mine. But, resources like oxygen and hydrogen do exist and may be able to be used to sustain humans and create rocket propellant. Read more about what the ISRU community is doing at the ISRU website.

Spirit busts a move!

2006-11-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, we commanded Spirit's first drive in over 200 sols, and she pulled through like a trouper, moving close to a meter. We basically pivoted around the current position about 30 degrees or so, in order to get some new material in front of the rover to look at. Through the winter, Spirit did a lot of interesting observations, but there wasn't a lot that was reachable with the arm instruments. Now, we're putting the arm down into the trenches that Spirit made when she dragged her wheel limping her way up to this position. The wheel drag basically made a trench in the soil, and in a number of places there is bright material exposed at the bottom of the trench. Usually the team gets all excited over bright material, because it frequently equates to salty, and by geologic inference, salty frequently means water in some form or another. Where we are right now, the water story is very slowly unfolding because of our lack of mobility, but we hope that doing some detailed work on the bright material in the wheel trenches will contribute to our understanding of where and how water was available in this area.

Sol1K!

2006-10-30T15:07:00.000-07:00

Spirit made it through Sol1K successfully! We have data products on the ground with the sol 1000 timestamp. But 1000 sols can really take its toll: Mars Rover Beginning to Hate Mars. Bruce Banerdt assures me that his comments “were taken completely out of context.”

To celebrate Sol1K, check out the awesome panoramas of Spirit's winter haven. If you have red-blue glasses, I highly recommend the red-blue anaglyph.

Red-blue-green: Why do some comet atmospheres glow green? The coma contains cyanogen (CN) and diatomic carbon (C2), which glow green when illuminated by sunlight (called "resonant fluorescence”) (from Science@NASA).

Bang, zoom, straight to the Moon

2006-10-30T09:48:00.000-07:00

This week, the Committee for the Scientific Context for Exploration of the Moon had our third meeting. What we’re charged to do is to consider the science that can and should be done in the new Vision for Exploration at NASA, which begins with new missions, both robotic and human, to the Moon. In some ways, it’s an easy task, because we haven’t landed on the Moon in 35 years, so many of the scientific questions we had after Apollo are still outstanding. In other ways, it’s a difficult task, because our understanding of all the planets has evolved so much since then, and we need to reconsider how the Moon fits into the solar system and in what ways it is unique. The Moon’s combination of unique science and accessibility make it a really exciting place to talk about and I really enjoy being in a room full of 15 people all jazzed about the Moon!

Some of the fundamental science that we can do at the moon is near and dear to me. We know that large impact craters are ubiquitous on planetary surfaces. One rather small crater on Earth, the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, was largely responsible for wreaking havoc with the Earth’s climate and food chain, triggering a mass extinction of many species on Earth, including the dinosaurs. When you look up at the Moon, the large dark patches are lava flows filling giant impact craters. These craters are 1000 km across and formed in collisions with thousands or millions of times as much energy as the collision that created Chicxulub. To an incoming asteroid or comet, the Earth and Moon appear as a system with a single center of gravity, so whatever hits the Moon has an equal or greater chance of hitting the Earth. So it’s logical that if the Moon experienced these huge collisions, the Earth did too. But where is the evidence on the Earth?

The largest craters on the Moon are very old (4 billion years or more) and they reside in a crust that is 4.5 billion years old. In contrast, the Earth recycles its surface all the time, through erosion, burial, mountain building and subduction. Very few rocks on the Earth are older than 3.5 billion years, and the oldest recognized rocks are a bit of outcrop in northwestern Canada at just about 4 billion years. There are certainly not enough rocks to recognize giant old impact craters at 4 billion years on the Earth. And yet, it was at this time that life was just getting started on Earth. If one medium-sized crater killed more than half the flourishing species in the Cretaceous, what would a hundred giant impacts do to primitive life on Earth?

Some of the outstanding questions about the effects on Earth have to do with how many impacts, how big, and how closely spaced in time. We can’t figure that out on the Earth, because we don’t have the rocks that recorded that information. But the Moon preserves all the evidence if we can just get there and look for it. Moon rocks tell us the timing of large impact events, when and how many, and can even tell us what made the impact, what kind of meteorite. And just like pieces of the Moon get knocked off onto the Earth, large impacts should knock pieces of the Earth onto the Moon, and we might be able to find some very ancient Earth rocks on the Moon (though they will be exceedingly hard to find).

Other way cool science at the Moon has to do with the Moon’s unique atmosphere, which is a combination of outgassing from the planet, solar wind interactions with the surface, and levitating dust; the environment at the lunar poles, where permanently-lit peaks might be good places for solar panels and permanently dark craters might act as cold traps that store volatiles like water; and deploying a network of monitoring stations that can measure moonquakes, the magnetic field, and heat flow from the Moon. It’s also neat to think about the opportunities for new robotic capabilities – with a round-trip communications time of less than 5 seconds, we’ll have a chance to explore as scientists on the Earth interacting with robots on the surface.

Stalking the elusive meteorite

2006-10-20T10:11:00.000-06:00

So you’ve all heard, at one point or another, news reports of big fireballs streaking through the sky or of rocks falling from space and punching holes in cars or causing injuries or damage. But those news reports are like twice a year, and halfway across the world from you, and you want to find a meteorite now.

I swear again, I do not plant these questions, but I just put up a new web page a couple of weeks ago, on New Mexico Meteorites, because we get a lot of questions about how to go meteorite hunting. Basically, it takes a lot of patience and time, and you need to be super-careful about whose land you’re on. Other than that, anyone can hunt meteorites. They’re basically irregularly shaped rocks with a black fusion crust and are heavy and magnetic. Unfortunately, that description also fits an awful lot of terrestrial rocks, so check out my other web page on How to Identify a Meteorite, including some easy tests you can do at home. And no, ANSMET team members don’t need to be familiar with meteorites to find black rocks on the ice, but the ANSMET program is funded for scientific purposes by NASA and NSF, so meteorite scientists get first crack at being team members, and as you might guess, there’s no shortage of volunteers from our community, though the project has also taken teachers, writers, photographers and astronauts.

What do you do with a meteorite when you find it? There’s (usually) nothing sketchy about private meteorite hunters. There are lots of people willing to pay for meteorites and if you take the time and money to find one legitimately, you can sell it on the open market. Meteorite hunters and scientific institutions have historically formed a partnership that benefits both of them – scientific institutions will classify and certify the meteorite’s authenticity in return for 20g or 20% of the mass of the meteorite, whichever is smaller. This allows hunters to sell authentic meteorites and scientists to retain pieces for study. In recent years, however, there’s growing concern about private meteorite hunting and selling both from a scientific point of view (frequently, the piece in scientific hands is unrepresentative and we don’t have the money to buy more pieces to really understand the rock) and from an ethical point of view (many meteorites are smuggled out of developing countries in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula by bribing local militias).

I’ll be going down to Texas in a couple of weeks (with explicit, written permission from the landowner) to field test some new equipment we here at the IOM got for meteorite recovery efforts if someone calls us and says they saw a fall, which people often do because the southwestern skies are big and clear. Metal detectors are good at finding meteorites among terrestrial rocks, but can be a pain because they also pick up a lot of spent ammo, aluminum foil and cans, and smelter slag. We’re also bringing a quick chemical test for nickel, with which we’ve had mixed results in lab testing, and a magnetic susceptibility meter, which measures the percentage of magnetic metal in the rock and seems to do a good job of distinguishing meteorites from slag.

Meteorites on Mars

2006-10-18T10:42:00.000-06:00

Speaking of cold, dry places to find meteorites, there are probably few better environments than the surface of Mars! There may not be concentration mechanisms on Mars like glaciers, but it's probably no surprise that each rover has identified a couple of meteorites, and probably missed others along the way...

Heatshield Rock, now an official iron meteorite named Meridiani Planum

Barberton, one of many rocks left as a lag deposits among the sand dunes of Meridiani Planum, and possibly a stony meteorite

Zhong Shan and Allan Hills, probably iron meteorites on Low Ridge in Gusev Crater

Meteorites: the low-cost, all-natural sample return missions

2006-10-18T08:52:00.000-06:00

In just about six weeks, I'll be joining my second season with the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET). I'm so excited! This year, I'll be on the reconnaissance team, scouting new icefields in the Transantarctic Mountains to see if any of them have a concentration of meteorites. It means I'll get to see a lot more scenery than the flat ice field where I spent last season! I'll be helping to maintain a web log of our activities, including sending some live data back from the field.

Why do we go to Antarctica to get meteorites? Meteorites fall randomly over the whole Earth throughout time. But, if a meteorite falls in the ocean, or fell 10,000 years ago, it's unlikely anyone's ever going to find it now. Once a meteorite lands, the Earth's forces of water and biology start breaking it down. There are some places on the Earth that are good for finding meteorites when there is a mechanism for concentrating many years' worth of falls in one spot and storing them under very dry conditions. The hot deserts are good for this, where meteorites land among the sand dunes and then when the wind shifts and starts blowing sand away, the meteorites are exhumed. Antarctica is also a good place because meteorites that fall on the glaciers get entrained in the ice (which is actually a pretty dry environment because the ice is so cold it never melts) and carried along the conveyor belt of the glacier. When the glacier runs up against a mountain, the winds convert the ice directly into the vapor phase (like leaving ice cubes too long in your freezer) and the meteorites are left behind. The ANSMET program has recovered more than 25,000 meteorites, or 85% of the world’s meteorite collection.

Why do we study meteorites? The basis of geology is that rocks hold information about the formation and evolution of their parent planet. On the Earth, we can hike around, study rocks in the field, and bring them to the lab for detailed analysis. But we've only collected rocks from only one other planetary field site, the Moon. So meteorites are especially scientifically valuable because they are the only rocks we have from Mars and the asteroids. Even lunar meteorites come from places on the Moon where human have never been and never sampled, and have given us a whole new view of lunar rocks. Remote-sensing techniques, like the spectrometers on our rover friends, are good at what they do but are still a far cry from being able to pick up a rock, crack it open, and measure its isotopic composition to, say, 1% accuracy.

Here's lots more about the scientific importance of meteorites, along with details on how they are collected and curated.

What's an ANSMET season like? You can check out last year's team blog or Linda's PSRD article written after the 2002 season. And, of course, you should tune in to my ANSMET blog to find out this year!

Rare meteorites and radar

2006-10-17T16:37:00.000-06:00

Here’s another question from the blog comment box: "Riddle me this Science Girl....I just read this story on CNN. What is so new about ground penetrating radar. It has been around for a long time hasn't it? What kind of crystals are embedded in the iron and why are they important? What is with the white gloves? The thing has been in the ground on earth for 10,000 years, isn't that just a little dramatic?"

Pallasites are very rare meteorites. They are basically big crystals of olivine (in gemstone form, olivine is known as peridot) embedded in iron-nickel metal. Besides being incredibly beautiful, they’re scientifically interesting, but it takes a step back to explain why, so bear with me. Like the Earth, many planets heated up when they formed and the materials separated out roughly by density. We see that today on Earth as the crust, mantle, and core. Mars has a similar structure, and so does the asteroid Vesta, and probably so did many other asteroids that have since been blown into pieces by collisions. Pieces that fall to earth of these exploded tiny planets are recognizable as pieces of otherworldly crusts (achondrites) and cores (iron meteorites). We don’t have any meteorites that are definitely mantle material, but the Earth’s mantle is made largely of olivine, and remote sensing of Vesta and the Moon show olivine-rich material in deep craters, so by analogy, we think that asteroid mantles are made of olivine too. Where would olivine mix with metal? At the core-mantle boundary. So pallasites are samples from the core-mantle boundary of asteroids, a relatively narrow zone and so therefore relatively rare.

This specific meteorite, the Brenham pallasite, is one that has gotten amateurs excited for years. Smaller pieces of this meteorite have been found in farmers’ fields all throughout the midwest. Traditionally, meteorites are found by stumbling across them by accident or by systematically sweeping an area by eye or with metal detectors. In the case of Brenham, people suspected there could be more pieces lurking below the surface, and last year, meteorite hunters found the biggest piece of Brenham using a metal detector. The piece described in today's news story was found by combining two pursuits: looking for more pieces of Brenham and validating a hand-carried ground-penetrating radar instrument (that’s the “new” part of the radar) to find local buried resources, like meteorites and water (read more about that in the more explanatory AP story). OK, maybe white gloves are overkill considering all the other organic stuff that’s been crawling over the meteorite, but the recovery party (in part from the curation staff at the Johnson Space Center) was following standard protocol for recovering meteorites, which includes trying not to transfer any human skin oils to the meteorite. While it may have been on Earth a long time, it probably hasn’t been touched by humans ever.

Honestly, I did not plant this question, but it allows me a very graceful segueway into my next planetary adventure: the Antarctic Search for Meteorites. More on that in my next installment!

Conjunction junction and sol 1000!

2006-10-13T09:19:00.000-06:00

Today's the last planning day for both rovers before solar conjunction. We're all excited because we're uploading 15 days of plans to each rover to conduct all on their own, then we'll get to drink from the firehose of data return in the last week of October!

The Mossbauer team is excited that we'll be using this chance to collect some fantastic Mossbauer integrations. The Mossbauer spectrometer works by exciting the sample with gamma rays and measuring the emmision and absorption response of the sample. The gamma ray energy on the rovers' Mossbauer spectrometer is tuned to iron, so that the response is a fingerprint of the iron-bearing minerals in the sample we're looking at. This is good because so much of Mars is iron-rich, so the Mossbauer mineralogy has been very useful. But, the Mossbauer source natually decays, and at more than 10 times its expected lifetime, the MB source is fairly weak. This means that to get a good signal-to-noise ratio, we need to leave the MB on a target for something like 48 hours to even get the major mineralogy. To tease out the fine details, it needs more time, and we're almost never able to give it that time before moving on - until now. Both rovers have more than 10 days of Mossbauer spectrometry planned over conjunction. Spirit is looking at her magnet, which has collected magnetic dust along its traverse, to look at what iron-bearing minerals make up the Martian dust from the atmosphere and the ground that gets kicked up by wind. Opportunity is looking at a patch of rock at Victoria crater and I'm super-excited to see what minerals it can find in the rock here!

While we're letting the rovers do their own thing during conjunction, their timers will roll over sol 1000! Since nobody expected them to live this long, much of their software was built to only accept 3-digit sols (up to 999). It's like Y2K for the rover - quick, buy some bottled water and duct tape! The ground and flight software engineers did a fabulous job of either fixing or working around this issue and testing it thoroughly, so we don't expect any problems. Still, I feel like when we next see our little friends, they'll have passed this major milestone.

Mission costs

2006-10-13T08:16:00.000-06:00

OK, so there's been some contributed discussion to this blog recently about how wimpy the Mars exploration plans seem to be, and how getting a big rig over there to do it right is really what we need. I don't intend this blog to turn into a political forum, but seeing as it's *my* blog, here's my take on it:

Space exploration is difficult. Space exploration is risky. Space exploration is expensive. Every time a mission fails (because it is difficult), the public demands that the next mission not fail (become less risky) and therefore the price goes up (becomes more expensive). Remember that 90's NASA mantra, "Faster, better, cheaper?" The inside joke was that you could only choose two out of the three.

During the era of Apollo, Viking, and Voyager, space exploration was driven by political pressure, not by science. Each Viking lander cost $1 billion in the early 1970's. That's something like $5 billion in today's money. The Apollo program is estimated at about $100 billion in today's money. Even the Russian Luna rovers are estimated to have cost $1-2 billion each back then. Of course, we have developed more and better technology, bringing the cost of missions down, so using today's technology, a Viking mission might cost $1.5-2 billion. Current Mars Sample Return estimates run from $2 to 4 billion. The reality is that putting a huge drill rig on Mars is not able to happen in the curent climate, where space missions are seen as being driven by science, and society just doesn't think it needs that much science.

I'll accept criticism that NASA, like all big government agencies, spends a lot of its money on bureacracy and could really use more imagination. But even if you were able to somehow cut the costs in half, billion-dollar Mars missions driven by science, however supercool and fantastic science it is, are going to be nearly impossible to fund until society sees them as valuable to them. Let's make a cynical comparison here: the movie Titanic grossed 1.8 billion dollars. Yes, the world's people spent $1.8 BILLION to go see one darn movie. That's three Mars missions right there, for one single movie.

OK, end rant. No more politics. Back to science!!!

What's the deal with water on Mars?

2006-10-10T08:38:00.000-06:00

So here's a comment I got today: "I followed the reports early on that there was some impressive evidence that Mars was once covered with water. However I also seem to recall that a few months later there were some dissenting view points. So, riddle me this science girl...What is the deal? Was Mars a wet and wild world of acidic, sulfur laden dihygrogen monoxide? Are there suspected sites where drilling might reach liquid water? Or is Mars just a dusty bin of chilly rocks?" OK, so here's Science Girl's attempt to summarize many people's work on this topic!

I think the consensus now is that there is a lot of evidence of liquid water in Mars' past, but we're still a little fuzzy on the exact details - when, how much, how long it lasted, and where it was. Orbital photos have long showed things that look like branching river valleys and more recently, the MOC camera has captured many images of gullies in craters that might be caused by seeping subsurface water. There's definitely ice in the subsurface now, and presumably if you dug or drilled, you'd be able to get to it - the Phoenix mission will try to do just this - but it's likely to be mixed with rock or dust like the Arctic tundra, not like a subsurface glacier.

One of the biggest contributions to the story is Opportunity's view of the rocks at Meridiani Planum. There's pretty convincing evidence that these rocks are sediments that were laid down by flowing water on the surface. But, the environment that formed the rocks is probably more analogous to a braided stream or wash in the desert southwest than the oceanic shelf off the East Coast. We don't know exactly when these rocks were made, but we do know that at that time, there was a lot of sulfur and oxygen at the surface, making the Martian environment pretty harsh, acidic and oxidizing - very unpleasant for life as we unerstand it. We're just now trying to come to more understanding of the acidic/sulfuric environments vs more "clement" environments with CRISM, a mapping spectrometer on the MRO orbiter, which will be able to pick out areas with sulfates (acidic, sulfurous weathering) and areas with things like clays that we think formed under more neutral and less sulfurous conditions.

But having said all that, remember that Mars is an entire planet. Think about it - is the Earth covered with water? Well, yes and no, sometimes it was in some places and sometimes in others, sometimes the water is liquid and sometimes it is ice. The rocks exposed in the Grand Canyon were laid down by a vast ocean 500 million years ago, but southern Utah is now a windy, barren desert. Underneath the Pacific Ocean, the rocks are formed by erupting magma and have only trace amounts of water in them. The Earth is geologically complex and has 4.5 billion years of history complicating it, but we've been living here and studying the world around us for tens of thousands of years. Mars is also geologically complex and also has 4.5 billion years of history, but we've been studying it only remotely and for only three decades. It's a long process, figuring out Mars, and science is about getting more and more little pieces that we integrate into our understanding, rather than sending one spacecraft and expecting it to tell us the conclusive story. But, of course, each of our little pieces comes with a price tag and so we need to make sure we wring all the science we can out of it and tell everyone what pieces we are finding!

Mars: The hip new place to see and be seen

2006-10-06T10:09:00.000-06:00

I nearly fell off my chair when my friend on the HiRISE team told me he'd seen us at Victoria Crater. You have to go check out the amazing, new, color images of Victoria as taken by the MRO camera at the HiRISE web page. I snipped out a zoom of the image here, where you can see the little trapezoid that is the rover deck and solar panels, the shadow of the camera mast falling to the right of the rover, and - oh my gosh - Opportunity's *tracks* to her position now on the Cape Verde promontory. Below that, you can also see her tracks out of the lower valley, called Duck Bay. How cool is this?!?!

Here's a link to the MRO Press Release that tells you more about the image.

So this is approximately where Opportunity is now, and will be for the next couple of weeks. Right now, Mars is opposite the Earth in their orbits - For every year that it takes Earth to go around the sun, it takes Mars about two. So sometimes, like last spring and in 2004, Mars and Earth are near the same points in their orbits and close together on the same side of the sun. That's when you can see Mars brightly shining in the night sky (and when you get those email hoaxes that Mars looks the same size as the Moon). In the off years, Mars is on the other side of its orbit from us, and the sun is in between our line of sight, called "solar conjunction" because Mars and the Sun appear to be close in the sky. When this happens, we can't communicate with spacecraft there and everyone takes a two-week break. Last time, the rovers took two weeks off too, but this year, we're radiating 15-day plans to them to continue to do science on their own!

Martian craters

2006-09-27T09:19:00.000-06:00

I know you've all been waiting for it as eagerly as we have .... today we're planning our last, cautious bump to the rim of Victoria Crater! Check out the images of Opportunity's approach via her navigation cameras: Tuesday and Wednesday. Today we'll be planning out the campaign that we'll conduct at Victoria. Basically, Opportunity will start with some spectacular remote sensing, so look for that later this week. Then, the team will decide which direction to start circumnavigating Victoria. We're expecting some fantastic orbital imaging from the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that will help guide the team's decisions on where to stop and hopefully, where to think about entering this beautiful crater! Stay tuned....

Terrestrial craters

2006-09-27T09:07:00.000-06:00

Last weekend I took a group of students and other scientists from UNM to Meteor Crater, just down the road from us in Winslow, AZ. We circumnavigated the crater (~2.5 km) in the morning and spent the aafternoon looking at ejecta nearby. It was good to see again just what a crater form looks like in person. When you see pictures, craters tend to look like bowls with gently sloping sides, and it's easy to think of the rovers as skating down them like halfpipes. But when you really see them in person, impact craters are imposing features, lined with near-vertical cliffs and jagged outcrops.

It was a real treat to have a fellow MER scientist, proto-Dr. Shawn Wright from ASU (below, with me at the crater edge), join us there to show us some of the remote sensing he did of the crater. Shawn came fresh off field work looking at potential craters in South America and though tired, he was enthusiastic about guiding us to his favortite locations around the crater. At several stops, we could easily trace cliff outcrops and correlate specific ejecta lobes with remote sensing imagery because of Meteor Crater's unique (and fortuitous) target material: discrete layers of red siltstone, yellow limestone, and sugary white sandtone.

It's dark when I wake up

2006-09-13T13:09:00.000-06:00

I know we're sliding into autumn for real when the sun's no longer up when my alarm clock goes off at 5:30 am (!). My daily attitude is definitely controlled by the sun - on sunny days I'm bouncy and energetic, and rainy days make me want to curl up on the sofa with a good novel and a warm cat. As the amount of sunlight in my day shrinks, I feel like I lose energy - just like our little friends on Mars. So we're all very relieved and happy that Spirit made it through the depths of another Martian winter with even enough energy to continue doing at least a little bit of science nearly every day. Power levels are on the rise again, little by little, and the rover appears to be in good health. Of course, the rover doesn't have to wake up until local sunrise *yawn* .

Opportunity, being near the equator, has my perfect life - sunny and warm year-round. She continues to zip along toward Victoria Crater, whose ejecta blanket turned out to look a lot like the normal Meridiani plains - flat, hard, some sand drifts. On sol 929 Opportunity almost got a hole-in-one by driving 100.31 meters to the small crater Emma Dean, where we are trying to look at what the bedrock in the ejecta blanket is. We got our last good look at the "normal" Meridiani rock at Beagle Crater (yes, another shameless plug for a caption I wrote). It's a really spectacular mosaic - and - there's a super-cool quicktime window you can open and scroll around the panorama from the center. Sweet!

August travel update II

2006-09-13T12:12:00.000-06:00

I mentioned a while back on this blog that one of the highlights of my summer was going to be visiting the Ries Crater in southern Germany - and it was. Here's a photo of me with Walter Goetz, who's one of the investigators on the MER Magnetic Properties Experiment. Walter joined me, Rob, and Gisela Poesges from the Ries Crater Museum for 2 days of fun on the outcrops inside and outside the Ries. We were also joined on the second day by Iris Fleischer and a group of grad students from the Mossbauer group in Mainz. It was super fantastic, really amazing to see the different kinds of ejecta so well preserved, we had tolerable weather except for one downpour, and Gisela knew all the best places to see shatter cones, the crater rim, megablocks, and lunch stops! Walter and I both got a lot out of the trip, trying to see impact products from the rover's point of view, and bringing back lots of samples for further study. Rob maybe didn't get so much out of the rocks, but Gisela did give him a chocolate model of the Ries Crater.

After Ries, Rob & I spent a couple of days in Krakow and western Poland checking out my family roots, then drove to Prague for the IAU meeting. It was a timely meeting to attend because it was where all the planet-definition discussion was heating up, culminating in the vote that redefined Pluto. I couldn't vote, because I'm not a member of the IAU, so don't send me hate email. Honestly, I didn't think it would fly, because at a contentious lunchtime forum during the week, the panel asked for an informal show of hands and the proposals were soundly rejected. Basically, everyone is upset at different aspects of the proposal so there was no consensus. It's far from over and don't be surprised when the IAU takes this up again in 3 years at their next meeting.

(You're wondering how I would have voted? We now understand that Pluto is the prototype of this belt of icy objects in the outer solar system - it's a new discovery and reflects our new understanding of the solar system, and *that's* exciting. How to codify it scientifically seems less of a problem than dealing with the "public outrage." I did a radio interview last week on the topic and one of the other guests says he knows someone who learned the planets *before* there was Pluto. I wonder what that was like, did people protest that now all the textbooks were obsolete and how could they be expected to come up with a new mnemonic? Crazy.)

August travel update I

2006-09-13T10:21:00.000-06:00

I had a great time traveling in August but I am so happy to be back in the saddle. I had real withdrawal symptoms while I was off doing other things and not always able to keep up with what's going on on Mars. I carried my laptop around, hungrily looking for wireless connections and internet cafes :)

In Zurich, at the Meteoritical Society meeting, I had a great time talking with some of our European APXS/MB colleagues including Christian Schroeder and Jutta Zipfel. We're all very excited that both rovers just uplinked a flight software update -an amazing thing to do so late in the mission - that includes some fantastic new capabilities for our little buddies. The most exciting thing for us IDD types is the ability to go-and-touch. Up til now, we need a full sol to approach a rock and downlink images from the hazard-avoidance cameras, then there's a human in the loop to assess the images and determine how safe it is to deploy and extend the arm out to touch a rock that we want to look at, then then next sol we uplink the touch command and can start taking data. Because of the vagaries of the planning process, this can actually take more than one sol sometimes. The new software will (hopefully) allow the rover to make an independent determination of a safe place to put the arm instruments and go and do it without us, saving us a sol (or more) of real time.

Also in Zurich, I found out to my surprise and infinite delight that the asteroid formerly known as 1981 EB28 is now officially 6816 Barbcohen! How cool is that! Read the UNM story about it here. It's only a tiny speck of a rock in the main belt, but this is where it was on Aug. 10, the day I found out!

You can see where it is any time by going here. Of course, Spirit and Opportunity already have theirs too!

A month of science

2006-07-27T13:22:00.000-06:00

Sorry for being lax this month. I am on my way back from my second Athena Science Team meeting. These meetings are giant science festivals, where people present ideas, works in progress, and results from recent experiments and observations. Even if you've been keeping up with the rovers' daily observations, its still difficult to get the bigger picture sometimes, so these meetings are very very useful. There were a couple of sets of presentations about questions that gnaw at us all - what is Home Plate? What is the structure of the Columbia Hills? How do rocks weather on Mars? How old is Victoria Crater? I gave a presentation about Gusev crater, its formation & structure, and how its central peak might underlie the expression of the Columbia Hills (really speculative). When we get the whole team together, it generates some fantastic discussion and really gets me jazzed for working on this amazing dataset!

This summer, I've been focusing on trying to understand Martian impact glass. A couple of the rock types in the Columbia Hills appear to have a glass component in some of the infrared spectra. But, when glassy rocks form on the Earth, they are very easily altered and weathered away. So, it's a little bit of a paradox as to why ancient Martian rock that look weathered still have glass in them. Plus, we don't really understand what the glass is or how much is there. Fortunately for us, we have a couple of examples of Martian glass here on Earth contained in the Martian meteorites. It may not be exactly the same glass, or even formed the same way, but I can do a lot more with a sample in my lab than the rovers can do on the surface. So, I'm trying to characterize the meteorite glass using various lab methods and compare it with our rock data from the mission. I'll be presenting my progress so far at two meetings in August: the Meteoritical Society meeting in Zurich and the International Astronomical Union in Prague. Yes, it's a rough life I lead this summer :)

New press release

2006-06-29T15:17:00.000-06:00

Last week, I attended a meeting of lunar scientists to talk about the science direction of the return to the Moon "vision" that NASA has. After work, we got talking about Mars, and one of my colleagues said that he was disappointed at the lack of depth in the MER outreach web pages. He said, it's always that the rover is looking at a rock, and he thinks, well duh, of course the rover is looking at a rock, that what the rovers do. But why? What's the science?

It was with that comment fresh in my mind that I was asked to write a caption for this week's public image release for Spirit, which has been working on this really interesting rock. We had to do a little bit of work to strike the right balance between getting the interesting part to the public while still being cautious because the results come out so fast that we scientists don't always have time to keep up with the data before moving on, and so our detailed science can lag behind the rovers' discoveries. The chemical and mineralogical data, in particular, take a lot of time and attention to be sure the calibrations and interpretations are the best we can do. In the case of Halley this week, I was pleased that we were able to give some specifics that the team agrees on.

Barb on Mars!

2006-06-23T13:01:00.000-06:00

Rovers don't take vacations

2006-06-18T19:56:00.000-06:00

As you can probably tell from the sporadic nature of this blog, I had a pretty busy travel schedule over the spring, not all of it related to Mars. I had long ago blocked out last week for "vacation" - not planning to go anywhere, just to take some mental time off. Well, instead I spent three of the days working for the rovers, two by schedule and one by volunteer. It's completely addictive. Opportunity has extricated herself from the Jammerbugt dune and we drove and took pictures of tracks last week. Spirit is still sitting in place taking the 360 degree Pancam mosaic.

But speaking of Pancam, last week I found myself in upstate NY for some family things and took a slight detour up to Ithaca for a couple of hours. I spent part of Opportunity's planning day with the Pancam crew at Cornell, which was fantastic (in that inner geeky way). I met several of the payload uplink people, with whom I've interacted on the telecon line many times, and got to see where the polycon shows them hard at work. I also was able to ask lots of questions about compression algorithms and other super geeky things I wonder about during the planning process. I don't think I'll be an expert remote senser anytime soon but the more I am able to actively interact, the more things soak in eventually.

Finally, my idol Steve Squyres was on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central last week; you can see the video clip there or download the entire 06/07/07 episode from iTunes. The more Steve does on this mission the more in awe of him I am and the more nervous I get around him! But Stephen Colbert does a great interview - he had a similar idea as mine - to drive the two rovers toward each other. OK, my idea was to have Robot Wars (verrrrrry sloooooowly) and his was to mate them and create a race of robot overlords, whatever. Each rover only has to travel 5336 km to meet in the middle; Spirit has driven 6.9 km already and Opportunity 8.1 km. At an average speed of 3.8 km/year, it'll only take another 1400 years or so. Stay tuned!

Thinking ahead

2006-06-02T15:38:00.000-06:00

Like 3 years ahead. This week I participated in the 1st workshop on where to land the Mars Science Laboratory in 2009. The Mars Science Laboratory is a huge rover - it looks like a really big version of MER but it's got 3x as many instruments, an expected lifetime of 2 years, and a roving capability of more than 20 km. But, there's only one of them, not twins like the MERs, and everybody wants MSL to land in a different spot on Mars. We've only landed in 5 places so far, so the planet is wide open! I talked about my preference for going to ancient terrain where we can try to assess what the early crust of Mars was and how it was changed by water at a time in Martian history when we think conditions were less harsh than they are now. To my sincere surprise, the site I (and two other people) advocated generated a lot of interest and will be getting a lot of extra remote sensing time in the upcoming months to characterize it more and see if it really is as fantastic a landing site as we think it is. Even without that bonus, it was a really interesting workshop, where scientists from all different disciplines and backgrounds came together just to talk about what makes a good landing site and what we as a community are interested in seeing and what tools we have or can get to make sure we pick the best spot possible for this highly capable mission. I felt quite priviledged to be a part of it, and I have my involvement in MER to thank for giving me the entry point into the community of Mars science.

Victoria Crater

2006-05-26T12:19:00.000-06:00

While Spirit is stuck in one place for a while, looking at the sky and dirt, I've been paying a lot more attention to Opportunity. Over at Meridiani Planum, we're headed toward this huge (by rover standards) hole in the ground, Victoria crater. Craters over here are named after great ships of exploration, and Victoria was the only ship to successfully return from Magellan's voyage around the world. Victoria crater is just about the size of Meteor Crater here in the southwest, a little less than 1 km wide. Check out the rim of Victoria crater as Opportunity approaches.

Victoria punched a deeper hole into the Meridiani Planum surface than the last big crater Opportunity visited, Endurance crater. Endurance crater was where we got to check out Burns Cliff, a fantastically well-preserved set of sedimentary layers in the inside crater wall that showed crossbedding, evaporite mineral casts, and the little hematite blueberries. Craters are nature's roadcuts, the way these little mechanical geologists will be able to check out what's underneath the surface of the plains, and we're all hoping that the inside walls of Victoria show us more wonders.

Right now, Opportunity is about to roll up onto Victoria's ejecta blanket, which is the apron of material that was thrown out of the crater and rained down around it. When craters form, a lot of stuff gets thrown out from a depth roughly as much as the drater diameter. As the rocks deform and fail with the crater shock, the final crater is much shallower, only about a tenth as deep as the diameter. So, the rocks in the ejecta blanket come from much deeper down than the rocks at the bottom of the crater now. If you want to look for the deepest rocks, you look at the edges of the ejecta, which is what's next on our journey. We're stopping nearly every weekend to check out our surroundings to see if anything is different yet.

It's a little ironic - we're now interested in changes in the rocks but all we see are really large expanses of the same Meridiani Planum bedrock. One of the science team members remarked that last year, huge expanses of crossbedded bedrock would have been nirvana for this rover. But the scientists were so good at eking out the geologic history from what small outcrops they had that now we are just enjoying this area for the ease of driving over lots of flat material.

Martian winter work, terrestrial summer work

2006-05-02T12:18:00.000-06:00

Spirit is nestled snugly in her Winter Haven and we are all getting in on the chance to conduct experiments that we never seem to have time for when we are on the move. Spirit is parked on the slope of Low Ridge, an arcuate feature that might be connected to, and possibly related to, Home Plate. Directly in front of the rover is an expanse of drifted dust and/or soil, which is the first target of an intense campaign with all the arm instruments to make measurements progressively deeper into the soil. There's also a long list of rock and soil targets for miniTES, some long-timeline atmospheric observations, and a monster panorama of our surroundings in all 13 Pancam filters, which should be really beautiful. For those of us interested in rocks, we have poor choices right now. There are a couple of clasts and possibly a shingle in our workvolume, which we will investigate. Several of us are hoping that after the solstice, we will be able to move to some rock targets ahead of us to figure out the geology of Low Ridge, its relationship to Home Plate, and the origin of some of these volcanic units around us.

In terrestrial analog news, I will be heading to the Ries Crater in Nordlingen, Germany, after the Meteoritical Society meeting this summer. Ries is a well-preserved 24-km diameter, 15 Ma crater with post-impact lacustrine layers inside and fantastic outcrops of ejecta. The Ries ejecta may be a good analog to Martian double-layered ejecta deposits. There is an upper ejecta layer (suevite) which is a mix of deep material and impact melt, overlying a lower layer (the Bunte breccia) which is an interesting unit formed when the first (shallow) ejecta was ballistically emplaced and churned up the substrate, mobilizing it and causing a radial flow. It is rumored there are distal parts of the Bunte breccia containing crossbeds and lapilli that may be potentially interesting to compare with proposed origins of Meridiani and/or layers in the Inner Basin. Cool!

Roving Mars!

2006-04-24T10:26:00.000-06:00

Rob and I finally went to see Roving Mars this weekend in Phoenix. It's an IMAX film about the launch and landing of Spirit and Opportunity and has some really spectacular full-screen renderings of some of the early data. It wasn't as long as I would have liked but it was amazing to see some of the pictures on the humongous screen. Also, I was glad to see some of the cenes of the scientists when landing occurred - I was in a tent in Antarctica at the time and missed the excitement. Something about Steve Squyres having his own IMDb entry strikes me as hilarious, though his brother Tim is a bona fide Hollywood editor.

Spirit is definitely nestling down for a long winter in her present location. Unfortunately for me, there's no good rocks right in front of the rover, so my grand plans for multi-rock analysis campaigns will have to wait until after the southern Martan winter solstice (August 8). The soil and remote sensing people are kicking into high gear for the first part of winter and have some really cool plans for looking at different levels in the soil and acquiring the McMurdo Pan, a grand 13-filter panorama of everything around us. Opportunity is still zipping along, less than 1500 m to go to Victoria crater!

So, while I am supporting operations, I'm trying to dig into some data analysis, including multivariate analysis. I took linear algebra in college as an elective because I am such a geek. It was one of the few classes where I succumbed to the whining refrain, "When will I ever use this in the real world?" Well, 15 years later, it's come round to haunt me with whispers of eigenvectors.....

Sand trap

2006-04-07T11:03:00.000-06:00

Wow, I'm sorry I haven't updated you all in a month! I've been traveling a lot this semester for work unrelated to MER.

Here on Earth, we had a fantastic turnout for the MER sessions at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, where the team updated everyone on the current science and other members of the community got to offer their own interpretations. Always lively, sometimes contentious, never boring. It's an exciting time to be looking at this data! I presented my poster on my ejecta calculations - how much ejecta from far-away terrains should we expect to find at the MER landing sites? I'll give you a clue: not much. But you can see the whole paper here. It's my first single-author paper and it was published on my birthday this year!

Up on Mars, Spirit is dragging a wheel. It's the right front wheel, the one that went gimpy early in the mission. At this point, it is steerable but not driveable and so it's just dragging behind us. In principle, that's fine and the rover is totally ok driving with 5 wheels. In practice, we got terribly bogged down in some soft, sandy soils and had some real scary days where the rover wheels dug in and we watched our power sink lower and lower. We re-evaluated our plans to get to north-facing slopes and decided to retreat back the way we came to better ground.

We chose a Winter Haven along Low Ridge, a small feature possibly connected to Home Plate, with nice slopes and lots of rocks. We're now developing plans for what to do there as Spirit waits out the winter. I think it's going to be a really exciting time because we will finally have time to sit in one place and do some detailed analyses of rocks and soils, so I'm actually very much looking forward to the winter, despite the scary power numbers!

On the other side of the planet, things are looking zippy - literally. Being nearer the equator and dust-free, Opportunity continues to have a favorable power situation even into the wintertime and is making amazing mileage along dune troughs and outcrop rock. We're only 2 crater radii away now from this humongous crater, Victoria, which is Opportunity's destination. It's old and eroded but probably dug pretty deeply into Meridiani Planum, so it should be super interesting when we arrive.

Rewarding rock

2006-03-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

Wow! My commands to Spirit to use her APXS and Moessbauer instruments on the rock last week apparently were the right ones and got through with no problems (sigh of relief here) and good thing too, because the rock is awesome! Obviously I can't post many details here, but I think I can say that it's probably some combination of a volcanic rock and Martian weathering, like many rocks we've seen, but in a weird and new and very interesting way. You might hear about it at LPSC next week.

LPSC is our big planetary science conference, held annually near the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It started as the Lunar Science Conference back in the day, then expanded to become the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. For the last couple of years it might as well have been the Martian and Other Planetary Science Conference. There's at least one Mars session every slot, and sometimes Mars goes head-to-head with itself. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone has been up to!

Another press release

2006-03-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

I was excited to write the press release for our first images of Home Plate a couple of weeks ago, check it out here.

Investigating Home Plate

2006-03-03T10:38:00.000-07:00

Spirit has spent the last couple of weeks on her Home Plate campaign. Since we arrived, we've seen layering in the rocks and some chmical evidence that might point to Home Plate being volcanic in origin, which is really interesting. No rover or lander has been to a volcanic center on Mars before! So we're taking the time here to get as many in situ analyses as we can plus a whole host of Pancam images and miniTES work. This week, I served as APXS/Moessbauer uplink lead, which meant that I determined what the rover needed to run the APXS and MB instruments on Spirit at the times we wanted it to. Now that the rovers have been going so long, some of this is old hat and doesn't need to be reinvented every time we do an analysis, but there still needs to be someone to make sure everything is ok for the instruments!

For the first time since I joined the team, I've been way too busy for the last three weeks with other aspects of my job to really keep up on what one rover is doing, much less both of them. It's much more clear to me now why they need new, enthusiastic people to come in and put the time into the rovers. I was glad to have a specific job to do this week that forces me to look at the data coming in and participate in the process. It's easy to get overwhelmed after missing even a couple of days!

Home Plate

2006-02-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

We’ve finally made it through part one of our race against winter, to the feature called “Home Plate” in the inner basin. Wild theories of its origin abound - everyone is getting in on the speculative volcanology. We’re now parked perilously up against an outcrop on the outer ring of Home Plate and doing a very nice campaign bringing all our instruments to bear. Keep an eye on the JPL home page for details of what we find!

Yet more training

2006-02-13T09:07:00.000-07:00

This week I spent a couple of days at the Johnson Space Center in Houston learning the ins and outs of two of our arm instruments – the Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and the Moessbauer spectrometer (MB). These two instruments give us detailed, quantitative information on the major-element chemistry (APXS) and mineralogy of the iron-bearing phases (MB) in the rocks, and are the two instruments that I’m most interested in for my work. So, as one of my operational roles, I wanted to learn more about how they work and how we make them work.

Both the APXS and the MB were designed and developed by German teams as contributions to the MER mission, and they are led by the Payload Element Lead scientists in other countries. They are the ones who know the real ins and outs of these instruments. But, in the current mode of remote operations, two people at JSC know an awful lot about the day-to-day operation of the instruments, and Houston is a lot easier to get to than Germany.

These three days were really rewarding for me. Days like that are the ones that keep me going through the slump months. It was the busiest couple of days on both rovers that we could have asked for, as both were using their arm instruments on interesting outcrops. I got to see lots of friends and meet new colleagues, learn something really interesting that only a few people in the world can do, feel confident that I can do it well, and talk about the science with a collegial bunch of planetary scientists. As an extra bonus, while there, I also got to see the Stardust samples making tracks through their aerogel collectors, just a few weeks after their return from Comet Wild/2.

The Earth's a planet too

2006-02-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

When I first joined the Athena team, I went out to dinner with my fellow New Mexican, Larry Crumpler. He said something that stuck with me - that the value of planetary geology is what you gain in being able to see the Earth differently, and hopefully, better. I'm finding myself looking around me all the time and asking, "How would the rovers see this?" It's especially true now that we're rounding third and heading for "Home Plate," a mysterious feature that could be a crater, a salt pan, a lava flow, or come combination of all three.

On my commute home every evening, I head up La Bajada hill, an abrupt fault face capped with spectacular columnarly jointed basalts of the Caja del Rio field, where I live. It's usually getting on dark when I creep up the hill, but this week I happened home early and saw my passage through the tumbling basalt boulders, steep arroyos, and deep red soils. I really paid attention to the illumination, the relationships between boulders and layers, to what I saw and what my brain filled in as "normal." It was one of those great moments when I'm so happy with my own brain. Then, later in the evening, it got dark and there was Mars itself, a shining orange point.

Downright Frothy!

2006-01-30T13:58:00.000-07:00

I wrote my first press relase for the rocks I fought for last week and now you can see it on the JPL web page. Here's the text:

Gusev Rocks Solidified from Lava

In recent weeks, as NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has driven through the basin south of "Husband Hill," it has been traversing mainly sand and dune deposits. This week, though, Spirit has been maneuvering along the edge of an arc-shaped feature called "Lorre Ridge" and has encountered some spectacular examples of basaltic rocks with striking textures. This panoramic camera (Pancam) image shows a group of boulders informally named "FuYi." These basaltic rocks were formed by volcanic processes and may be a primary constituent of Lorre Ridge and other interesting landforms in the basin.

Spirit first encountered basalts at its landing site two years ago, on a vast plain covered with solidified lava that appeared to have flowed across Gusev Crater. Later, basaltic rocks became rare as Spirit climbed Husband Hill. The basaltic rocks that Spirit is now seeing are interesting because they exhibit many small holes or vesicles, similar to some kinds of volcanic rocks on Earth. Vesicular rocks form when gas bubbles are trapped in lava flows and the rock solidifies around the bubbles. When the gas escapes, it leaves holes in the rock. The quantity of gas bubbles in rocks on Husband Hill varies considerably; some rocks have none and some, such as several here at FuYi, are downright frothy.

The change in textures and the location of the basalts may be signs that Spirit is driving along the edge of a lava flow. This lava may be the same as the basalt blanketing the plains of Spirit's landing site, or it may be different. The large size and frothy nature of the boulders around Lorre Ridge might indicate that eruptions once took place at the edge of the lava flow, where the lava interacted with the rocks of the basin floor. Scientists hope to learn more as Spirit continues to investigate these rocks.

As Earth approaches the Chinese New Year (The Year of the Dog), the Athena science team decided to use nicknames representing Chinese culture and geography to identify rocks and features investigated by Spirit during the Chinese New Year celebration period. In ancient Chinese myth, FuYi was the first great emperor and lived in the east. He explained the theory of "Yin" and "Yang" to his people, invented the net to catch fish, was the first to use fire to cook food, and invented a musical instrument known as the "Se" to accompany his peoples' songs and dances. Other rocks and features are being informally named for Chinese gods, warriors, inventors, and scientists, as well as rivers, lakes, and mountains.

Speculative Volcanology

2006-01-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

I've been mostly interested in what Spirit is doing in Gusev crater, because I am a hard-rock kinda girl, and that's where the good rocks are. But this week, I documented for Opportunity, and had a great time! Opportunity is sitting at a location called the Olympia outcrop, that features some really exceptional ripples and crossbedding, and the team is taking its time getting the coverage this outcrop deserves. While I was on, we planned several mosiacs using the Microscopic Imager (MI). The field of view of this little camera is about 4 pennies if you arranged then 2 by 2. So to get a lot of coverage, we take a bunch of images and mosic them together. In addition, because the instrument is so close and the surface is not exactly a plane, we take a stack of images moving a few millimeters closer to the surface each time, and then examine them to find the one that is in the best focus. It's not really difficult to get these MI mosiacs, but there are a lot of detailed commands and it is challenging to make sure they're all correct and in the right order. But of course, the engineering team is terrific at doing this by now!

On the Spirit side, I've been dabbling in speculative volcanology, a new discipline I could really get into. Basically, we're seeing lots of volcanic rocks and the orbital maps seem to show lava flows as well. But, we haven't gotten any decisive data yet, and I'm not a volcanologist. It has been fun (for me, anyway) to learn about various modes of volcanism from my officemate and from other members of the team who are willing to listen to my latest crazy idea!

Pattern recognition

2006-01-18T11:18:00.000-07:00

I'm doing Documentarian for both Spirit and Opportunity this week. It's been described as "watching paint dry," but I actually find it interesting to know in exquisite detail what the plan is today. But there are long stretches where I have to be half-listening to a roomful of people and wait until there's something important being talked about, so I can't go off and work on something that really absorbs my brain. Instead, I have to rely on my brain's pattern-recognition to alert me. When you’re next in that situation, and want to keep your pattern-recognition skills up to par, try the online version of my favorite game, SET.

Science Team Meeting

2006-01-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

I spent last week at JPL in Pasadena for some training and my first Athena team meeting. It was a long but fulfilling week for me!

The first two days, I shadowed the Keeper of the Plan, a job I hope to start in a month or two. This job is to keep track of all the science activities people request for the day. Like Doc, which I’m doing right now (right now!), it’s a good way to keep my interest in the day-to-day activities of the rovers. It’s like the difference between taking a class for credit or audit – when I audit a class, it’s more difficult for me to find the time to devote to it than if there’s something riding on it. During the first part of the week, I spent the mornings in the science meetings and the afternoons with the planners and learned more about the process. Steve Squyres himself was there as chair, so it was wonderful to sit through the process with him and pick up bits of knowledge.

While we were all at JPL, we had some very crowded planning meetings and happened across a white sand patch that turned out to be packed with sulfur. My roommate Aileen and I were up very early in the mornings to get in and help with picking targets! I know things are busy when they cut into my precious sleep time.

The last three days were spent with the entire Athena team, gathered in the auditorium to talk science. I was very intimidated at first, had to introduce myself to everyone and felt like I should justify my addition to the team. But everyone was super, very welcoming and interested. I gave a talk on my interests that went ok - I wanted it to be fabulous, but it was just ok. I couldn’t think of anything funny to put in it so just gave it straight. One thing I resolved on the second day was to speak up when I had a question or comment instead of asking my neighbor quietly. Surprisingly to me, I did that 5 times! Ultimately, the talks and the time to meet with people were great for me to see what we are still struggling with, what new ideas can be generated, and what I have the tools to jump into.

Gathering courage

2006-01-08T16:23:00.000-07:00

I had a great week as a science theme group lead for Spirit. This week we had little to do as we drove the rover hard, even dipping into the battery power, to push it along the road toward its winter haven. In cases like this, it’s up to the scientists to make sure we don’t zip along without at least looking around once in a while. Because we’re now traversing the basin floor, a lot of us want to know what the basin floor is made of. We passed a bedrock outcrop midweek but couldn’t stop. So I screwed up enough courage to make the case in our Friday meeting to look for a bedrock outcrop as we move toward our destination. I know a lot of people are thinking the same thing, so it wasn’t a complete shot in the dark, but I still felt like I was sticking my neck out. Fortunately I didn’t seem to embarrass myself and I think people took me seriously, though there probably isn't enough time to alter our path in the way I suggested.

Rock Star

2006-01-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

I was asked for my autograph recently, by a collector who has an old USGS Viking map and is getting it signed by prominent Mars scientists. When asked, I had to demur – I’m certainly not in the league of Bruce Murray, Steve Squyres, and Ray Bradbury! But this great guy thought that maybe someday, I would be :) I got to choose my favorite spot on Mars, and I chose Argyre Basin. Argyre is one of the best-preserved large impact basins on Mars. It’s more than 1000 km across, stratigraphically old, and has a beautiful mountain ring around it that is presumably the remnants of its ejecta. Most of the work I’ve done in my career is related to trying to reveal the history of bombardment in our solar system in its early years, and when my attention turns to Mars, that’s what I wonder about. We don’t have any plans at present to visit Argyre, but it’ll be a fantastic location someday to learn about Martian cratering history, large basin formation, and other things like the past Martian geotherm and possibly the climate record in the infilling sediments.

(With apologies to Sir Mix-a-Lot and to you, dear reader)

I like Big Basins and I cannot lie
You scientists can’t deny
That when a crater formed 4 billion years ago
And that’s where the spacecraft goes
You’ll get sprung! Wanna land your stuff
Cause you’ll notice that basin’s stuffed
With climate records in the sediments
And ejecta in the pediments
Ooh ring of mountains
Of knowledge it’s a fountain
Push that record later, later
Cause this ain’t no average crater

Science Themes

2006-01-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

I didn't get to upload a couple of entries last week - they're now posted below by date.

This week I have my first shift as a science theme group lead. The operations of this mission were carefully structured by Steve and his management along science lines where the team thinks of the rovers as integrated instrument packages. That may sound mundane, but in the world of missions, frequently instrument teams find themselves pitted against each other for time and power resources. The science-based approach has worked well on this mission and encourages us all to work together toward our common goals of exploration and discovery.

The science groups are centered around geology, mineralogy & geochemistry, atmospheres, and physical properties. Scientists from each group are responsible for ensuring that activities get planned that support these areas of Martian science. My interests are mainly in geochemistry and mineralogy, so I am in that science group, and this week I am the lead advocate for the group. In practice, this isn't a lot more time than I'd normally put into looking through the data and taking an interest in what's coming up, but there are a couple of systematic observations I'm responsible for suggesting, and of course, I'm a little nervous about not making a fool of myself :)

1/1/05: Leap Second

2006-01-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

This year’s leap second may not help me and my habitual 10-minutes-late-for-everything, but it did get radiated to all the spacecraft. Just in case you were worried.

12/31/05: Enforced Vacation Break

2006-01-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

Happy New Year! I’m here at a Santa Fe Starbuck’s with my laptop and a Tmobile hotspot, checking out what the rovers accomplished over the long weekend. Did I mention that I’m completely addicted? :)

Most of the MER scientists and engineers got a well-deserved break over the holidays. But the rovers wouldn’t know what to do with a day off. They get so much new energy every morning, like my cat! So a few people were busy right before both holiday weekends putting together multiple 3-day plans to keep the rovers busy while we went home to families and celebrations. The University where I work is closed all week between the holidays, and it’s a pleasant break to not have to drive the hour+ to get there, so I was happy to bring my speakerphone and laptop home for the week and keep up remotely.

I get to the Starbucks closest to our house (it’s about a 15-minute drive into town) for an hour in the morning while Rob’s still asleep and just download what’s available – images, documents, everything. Then I bring it home and sort through it, make mosaics and false-color views, read what actually got accomplished in the last plan, see if I can spot interesting targets where we are, make sure I understand where we’re going and what people think we should do. Then, I call the telecon line from home and participate in the science planning process for the day. It’s total about 3.5 hours for the day if I want to really get into it. There are summaries and other ways to stay abreast of developments on a weekly basis, like this great web site at JPL that I use to check on Opportunity while I am focused on Spirit.

But for the rest of the week, I did take vacation. Rob also had the entire week off and my brother came into town for Christmas and the first part of the week. He’s super fun and we had a fabulous 5 days. Rob and I had big plans to be tourists in our own state for the rest of the week, but those all got canceled when we both got sick and spent the next 5 days cooped up at home sleeping, reading (me), and playing computer games (Rob). Objectively, that’s probably the vacation we needed.

12/28/05: The Lost City of El Dorado

2006-01-03T08:44:00.000-07:00

Since I've been involved in this project, we’ve been steering Spirit down the southern flank of Husband Hill and into a basin. Up against the leeward side of many of the hills in this area are vast (from the rovers’ perspective) black dunefields. They’re black because they’re not covered with the ubiquitous red Martian dust, which means they must be relatively young or frequently moving. They’re also probably black because they’re basaltic.

We had a team meeting to decide whether we wanted to spend a couple of weeks heading for one of these dunefields near us, called El Dorado. There are several members of the team interested in aeolian processes (how sand moves) and physical properties of the martian surface (which might be very different in fresh dunes vs old soil), who are eager to go. But what convinced me to get on board was the fact that El Dorado is visible from several orbiting spacecraft. It’s an exceptional opportunity to collect real Martian ground-truth to help interpret orbital data, a topic about which I’ve been known to kvetch.

So down through the rocky, desolate Indian country Spirit went, trading among the Apaches and Comanches, heading southwest on the path to El Dorado. The rover planners outdid themselves again, with some lengthy beauties of drives topped off with a scuff right on a dune face. And here we'll spend a long holiday weekend with the arm out, using all our instruments in chorus on the black sands of El Dorado.

Big Push

2005-12-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

Sorry I dropped off for a couple of weeks - I got busy with a couple of real things. I wrapped up a paper and an LPSC abstract based on the work I did for my MER team proposal. The science that I'm interested in relates to large impact events, what they do to rocks, and what information we can pull out from the rocks about the impacts that created them. So far in my career, I've been able to get some interesting impact information from terrestrial rocks, lunar rocks and from meteorites - but all by picking up the rock and taking it into the lab for analysis. Mars is a whole different story. These rovers are strictly in-situ instruments. They can't pick up rocks and turn them over. They can't break open the rocks to look inside. And they certainly can't launch the rocks back to Earth for me to be able to put them in the lab! So it's required a change of reference frame for me.

The first thing I did was to try to determine how much material at the MER landing sites might have been thrown there by large impact events - no sense trying to look for things that don't exist! Using some simple equations, I estimated that at least at the Spirit landing site, we should expect to see a couple of horizons of interesting impact ejecta. So I worked up that first attempt into a paper and an abstract that I'm sure will generate some discussion at our next meeting in March. But, this isn't a straightforward exercise. Though we understand quite a bit about lunar and terrestrial craters, Mars is more complicated in a lot of ways. Mars probably has water ice in much of its subsurface and when a meteorite slams into the rock + ice mixture, strange things happen. So now I have to take the next step and try to understand more about Martian crater forms.

Now that I have more access to data and more importantly, to knowledgeable scientists, I'm also diving into trying to identify the rocks that might be products of impacts and to be able to get information out of them. That's my 2-year plan, though, so that's a big mountain of learning ahead of me. :)

Science vs Survival

2005-12-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

It's autumn in Gusev Crater, and the sun is moving lower in the sky. Opportunity is near the equator and doesn't see much of a change, but Spirit is feeling the chill in the air. The power we are getting from the solar panels is steadily decreasing - not enough to make a difference to our science activities now, but enough that we can see when we're going to have to start worrying about it. Last winter, the clever team got Spirit onto north-facing slopes to tilt the solar panels toward the low sun. This autumn, we are moving off Husband hill on a south-facing slope and into a basin, so there's some urgency we feel in getting into a position to be on north-facing slopes come winter.

Fortunately, because the year on Mars is twice as long as on Earth, it's not winter yet (though in Santa Fe, temperatures have been in the single digits F and there's been snow!). So, we have a couple of months yet before winter really sets in. But a couple of months to the rover is not so long when it takes a whole day to drive 30m! Just as I came on as a new science team member, one of the first telecons I attended addressed this issue. It was decided that we needed some serious discipline to get us where we needed to go, into the basin, with some margin, so that we could find safe haven for the winter months. To me, this was a huge blow - bring new, excited team members on to the rovers and then tell them you're going to have to rein in a lot of your scientific curiosity?!? But that's the reality of the situation if we want to keep these amazing little machines in good health for future discoveries.

This issue came up again this week, as we saw a spectacular outcrop and half the team wanted to go there to see what it is and half the team wanted to press on to make sure we get to safer ground. It's a really difficult discussion to have, because realistically, there are only so many science stops we can make. It comes down to trading an interesting science goal in front of us for possibly *more* interesting science activities in the future, and I think it's espeically hard to come in new and want to do something immediately. Though we bring fresh perspectives, we might also lack the experience to know when something's not worth stopping for. This time, we're stopping, and I'm glad for now. If it turns out to be a stop for something we've already seen, everyone will be disappointed and we might have to skip something later too. But that's the nature of science, some roads lead to fabulosity and others dead-end unexpectedly.

Documenting Spirit's weekend

2005-12-05T08:39:00.000-07:00

I meant to post this on Friday - I spent a long first day on the job. Every day that we do planning for a rover, there is someone on the job taking notes. The idea is so take detailed enough notes that 100 days later, or a year, or ten years, someone can look at the notes and figure out what we were thinking and why we wanted the rover to do this particular activity.

After a week of "shadowing," I had my first real day on Friday. It actually started Thursday afternoon, with a pre-meeting to outline what we expected to do. On Friday, we were planning 3 sols of activities to take us through the weekend, so it was a long list of what people wanted to do and the pre-plan gets things in order so we only need to hash out the details later. On Friday morning, I came in at my usual 7:30 am, looked at all the data that had come down, read all the emails from people that were circulating, and made sure I had all the random pieces of software running. I tagged-up with the day's planners and managers at 8:30 to make sure we were all present and on the same page. Then I got the various reports and listened in to the morning's science telecon at 9, where all the interested scientists dial in and decide what we want to do.

I summarized the morning meeting around 10 am. I'm a terribly poor typist, so it's not easy to keep up with detailed notes, but I am keenly interested in the details, so it's not that hard to remember things from my misspelled notes. Then, I got on a different telecon line and listened in all day to our incredibly talented engineering staff, who take the list of activities the scientists want and spend all day turning it into lines of code the rover can understand and execute. My job there is to make sure the science activities do actually make it in, note when any changes are made and why, and be an extra brain to double-check on everything.

The activities go through several iterations of turning into more and more detailed engineering-speak, and there are three meetings during the day where various people get together to comb through the latest iteration and double-check it. This is where tiny improvements are made or tiny mistakes get caught. Finally, at about 6 pm, we concluded our meetings for the day and left it to the dedicated JPL staff to turn our requestes into a long code to radiate to the rovers. I finalized my report and posted it for everyone to refer to at about 6:30.

So, it was a long day, but at the end I knew, to the most minute detail, everything Spirit was going to do over the weekend. It was an exhilirating feeling. Several times over the weekend, at home, I could look up at the bright orange point of Mars and imagine, very accurately, whre Spirit was headed and what it might be seeing.

Working in a cold desert environment

2005-11-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

After our firehose of information at JPL, I spent a week traveling to New York to talk about the Moon and Lunar exploration at the gracious invitaiton of the folks at the American Museum of Natural History. I went to the American Museum and the Hayden (as it was knowm back then) planetarium frequently while growing up and I remember the huge dioramas of New York State mammals fondly. It was a great pleasure and privilege for me to be invited there professionally. I also got to spend Thanksgiving day in Albany with my family, which was really great, fun, and relaxing.

Now that I'm back home, in the cold, clear air among the desert rocks of New Mexico, I'm in a Martian state of mind. This week, I'm setting up my office to be a remote operations station for the rovers. As one might expect, JPL takes a lot of precautions to safeguard data and computers, so there is some work setting that up correctly. In addition, because the MER mission was only expected to last 90 days, there waasn't a lot of incentive to make software as streamlined or user-friendly as it might be otherwise, and system updates have come and gone. Once you get familiar with all the tools, they're surprisingly intuitive, but this week is dedicated to really digging in, listening every day to the process end-to-end, figuring out where things reside and how to generate files. It's the really unglamorous side of spacecraft operations, but it's unexpectedly satisfying to come out at the end of the day with a plan to radiate to the spacecraft that sets you up for another day of potential discovery.

Mars needs women

2005-11-15T23:48:00.000-07:00

In this last round of selections, two of the eight scientists selcted for the Athena science team were women. One is me, the other is Aileen Yingst, who is a friend of mine from a long time ago. We were in grad school at the same time and have kept in touch with each other through conferences and email. We are sharing a room this week and going through training together, and I am so grateful! It is so great for me to be able to talk with he about our common experiences, hopes, and fears. Of the "classic" science team, only two others are women, but the JPL operations team is about half women, and some days all the operations roles are filled by women! That's something truly remarkable. Check out this great article about the first female rover driver: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/20051109.html

Training

2005-11-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

After a hectic few weeks clearing a lot of work off my plate, I'm at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the MEr project is run. It's a real thrill and priviledge to meet the people who make the rovers work, and who make sure the rovers continue to work. I'm still pretty stunned to be a part of it all.

I and the other new scientists new to the team have spent the past two days in the amazing, high-tech MER conference room staring wide-eyed at 7 computer projected screens as the scientists, instrument engineers, and various other personnel have turned a firehose of information upon us. We are all completely overwhelmed with what it takes to run this mission successfully. We are each expected to contribute our time and talents to the mission, but have been given free rein to decide which roles we would like to fill. Personally, I am having some difficulty in choosing. I feel like a kid in a candy store, where everything looks interesting and appealing, and I want to try it all! Fortunately for all of us newbies, the rovers are in excellent health and show no signs of imminent demise, so I might get my wish to be able to sample it all.

We are also interacting every day with the daily operations people. It is nice to be able to have a real person to conect with the voices I'm been listening to on telecons and the backs of heads I see in the videoconferencing. Tonight, we had a little social event - we ended up talking a lot of shop, but also got to hear a little about other peoples' backgrounds, and drink some beer too, as geologists are wont to do when gathered together.

The rest of the week will be concentrating on hand-on experience with the daily tools of operations planning. We also will all participate in this week's end-of-sol meeting, a weekly tag-up just for the scientists to talk about science. It's where we get to present new results, share wacky ideas, argue over interpretations - the stuff we really like to do!

Dreams

2005-11-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Steve Squyres' book before going to sleep at night, and having these dreams where I'm personally responsible for crashing the rovers!

Telecons

2005-11-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

This week, I've been lurking on the kickoff telecons that take place at the beginning of each (earth) day. These telecons are where the team tags up to make a plan for the rovers for the next day. Because of the 9 minutes it takes a radio signal to get the Earth from Mars, and another 9 minutes to send a signal back, it's impractical to interact with the rovers in real time. Instead, every day we uplink a whole sequence of commands to the rover, telling it what we want it to do with its day on Mars. The rovers have some very sophisticated software onboard so you can tell it, "Go 30 meters north" and it will use its judgement to avoid rocks and go around obstacles to end up where to tell it to. You can also tell it to point its instruments at the sky or at a specific point on the ground and take pictures or get a science observation.

In addition to the daily plans, the science group also has long-term plans for each rover that get reviewed every week or so and guide the daily planning. This week, we evaluated what we want Spirit to be doing for the Martian autumn. We want to get to a specific target that is far away, and we need to get there before the winter sets in and the solar power available drops by a lot. To do this long-term plan requires a lot of driving and doesn't leave a lot of time for wandering around. It's good to be in on these discussions so that I can better judge what potential constraints on my science interests are.

First telecons

2005-10-28T15:27:00.001-06:00

Today I listened in on the science planning telecons for both Spirit and Opportunity. There's a lot I don't understand yet, but the gist is that engineers and science team members get together every day, review the data that was successfully downloaded the previous day or overnight, get updated on the rover and instrument health, and decide what commands to uplink to the spacecraft to have it continue its long-term science goals. It's a surprisingly collegial process, where (at least today ) everyone got what they needed and what they wanted in terms of observations, driving distance, etc. There's some special software that allows everyone to see the same presentations and the command sequencing, as well as videocameras to the JPL planning room, because most of the scientists partipate from their home institutions rather than living at JPL.

Miss MER

2005-10-28T15:27:00.000-06:00

That's how a friend recently addressed me in an email - I am a new member of the Athena Science Team and will be working with the fabulous little robotic explorers on the Martian surface to get to new places and look at new rocks and try to figure out what we can about Mars. So many people have asked me what's going on, what will I actually be doing, what does it take to drive the rovers around, what will I be learning - so I'll be keeping this blog for a while to let you know when I do! So far, I don't know a whole lot about my new role but I'll try to reflect what it's like as I learn.

First of all, the Mars Exploration Rovers are twin spacecraft built and operated by the Jet Propulsion Lab in Los Angeles. The rovers each carry a package of instruments called the Athena science package. So I'm a member of the science team, chosen to conduct science investigations with the instrument package.

The MER rovers landed on Mars in 2004 and have been like the energizer bunny - still going! The principal investigator, Steve Squyres, recounts the building, launch, and first year of the mission in his book, Roving Mars : Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet, that I will be picking up this weekend.