The Moon is a planet too

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?

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

Opportunity leaves Victoria Crater. More to come.

Sit in on an SOWG

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

(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!

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

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?

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!

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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 (?)

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

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

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

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

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!!!!!!!