All of the greatest explorations undertaken by humanity have been hindered by unexpected variables, the Mars One mission is no exception. The first settlers on Mars are currently projected to begin colonization in 2025, making homo sapiens an inter-planetary species. With so much progress and many promising suppliers to propel the mission there are plenty of reasons to be excited!
Mars One is an ambitious project that aims to make the human species multi-planetary. According to the Mars One website, “Mars One is a not-for-profit foundation that will establish a permanent human settlement on Mars.
If you’re expecting a punchline to that title, then guess again. It’s no joke. Surprisingly, Australia shares some remarkably similar geology to our neighbouring planet. Specifically the Red Centre, the arid heart of Australia, is the most Mars-like place on Earth!
It’s possible that people may have mused on the similarities already. After all, with its strikingly rich colours, the Red Centre (more often known as the Outback) certainly looks like few other places on Earth. Without any vegetation, the colour of the soil and rocks in the region could easily resemble Mars in places. But evidently, this resemblance is more than just skin deep. The clue that lead to this fascinating realisation? Another of Australia’s most beautiful and iconic of things – opals.
A view from the top of Uluru, showing it’s distinctive red colour. Credit: Binarysequence/Wikimedia Commons
Patrice Rey at the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences was investigating how opals formed. It may be surprising to learn that opals are found in few other places on Earth, with roughly 90% of all opals worldwide having originated in Australian mines. Beautiful and sought after, there’s been a lot of mystery behind opals for a long time – specifically about how they form, why they’re found at such shallow depths under the Australian soil, and why they’re found nearly nowhere else on Earth.
The story of these beautiful sparkly gemstones, it turns out, began around 100 million years ago. At the time, most of central Australia was covered by the Eromanga Sea. In times past, this huge epicontinental (inland) sea covered what is now known as the Eromanga Basin – spanning an area of one million square kilometres and reaching into much of what is now Queensland, the Northern territories, South Australia and New South Wales.
During the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs still ruled our planet, this sea would have been teeming with prehistoric life. But much like the dinosaurs, the Eromanga Sea was doomed. Around 100 million years ago, the climate of Earth began to change and the sea began to dry out. The sea dried out rapidly on geological timescales, to cover a much smaller area. The result was that the chemistry of the surrounding rocks began to change.
As the Eromanga Sea dried out, pyrite minerals in the surrounding rocks began to release sulfuric acid, causing acid weathering on a huge scale – quite possibly the largest Earth has ever seen. The opaline silica which was created in the Australian rocks during this process would later go on to form into opals. But the big clue is the acid weathering – we only know of one other place in the Solar System where this has happened in the past. Planet Mars.
While the predicament of prehistoric Australia is, as far as we know, unique on Earth, Mars actually shares a lot in common with this event. Except on Mars, we believe that the drying out of seas happened on a global scale. Hints of this were detected in 2008, when NASA’s twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, detected several telltale clues in the Martian soil.
The surface of Mars was found to hold opaline silica, iron oxides, and certain types of clay. All of these clues led areologists* to conclude that the surface of Mars had been subject to huge amounts of acid weathering. The exact same type of acid weathering which Rey and his fellow researchers have now discovered to have happened in Australia!
An opal doublet from Andamooka, South Australia. Credit: CRPeters/Wikimedia Commons
If you’re thinking that this means that there may be Martian opals waiting to be discovered somewhere on the planet next door, it’s hard to say. But it’s certainly a possibility! There is, however, one final step in the formation of opals. The opaline silica which was found on Mars is not yet true opal. In Australia, the surrounding rock has an impressive capability to neutralise acid. This means that after the ground in Australia became riddled with opaline silica, the surrounding conditions quickly went from acid to alkaline. When this happens before the silica trapped in rock cavities dehydrates and solidifies – voila! Opals! Of course, there’s a good chance that Mars may be home to some kinds of rock which can also neutralise acid the same way.
So only time will tell. Perhaps someday in the future, Martian colonists may be using Mars opals to create the first ever jewellery made elsewhere in the Solar System!
*An areologist studies the geology of Mars, seeing as technically the “geo” in geology refers to planet Earth.
Could there be opals hiding under the Martian soil? Credit: NASA/JPL
Being responsible for picking the week’s most interesting science stories is a fun and fascinating challenge. It pushes to me to look beyond my own interests and explore what others find compelling. So I trust you find my ‘science making news’ selection of interest and delight; explore the quantum, human, off-world and mathematical highs of the week.
On the human scale an international team of scientists has been investigating the antibiotic properties of sweat. More precisely they discovered how a natural antibiotic called dermcidin, produced by our skin when we sweat, is a highly efficient tool to fight tuberculosis germs and other dangerous bugs.
Their results could contribute to the development of new antibiotics that control multi-resistant bacteria.
The benefits of a good nights sleep once again are news. Researchers have shown that the disruption in the body’s circadian rhythm can lead not only to obesity, but can also increase the risk of diabetes and heart disease.
Our study confirms that it is not only what you eat and how much you eat that is important for a healthy lifestyle, but when you eat is also very important.
Disruption of body’s circadian clock increases risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. (Credit: Daniel Dubois, Vanderbilt University)
At the quantum scale, the particle physicists are at it again. Not content with discovering the Higgs Boson they are shedding light (pardon the pun) on a possible 5th force in nature. In a breakthrough physicists have established new limits on what scientists call “long-range spin-spin interactions” between atomic particles. These interactions have been proposed by theoretical physicists but have not yet been seen. If a long-range spin-spin force is found, it not only would revolutionize particle physics but might eventually provide geophysicists with a new tool that would allow them to directly study the spin-polarized electrons within Earth.
The most rewarding and surprising thing about this project was realizing that particle physics could actually be used to study the deep Earth.
The latest news from Mars is that curiosity has relayed new images that confirm it has successfully obtained the first sample ever collected from the interior of a rock on another planet.
Many of us have been working toward this day for years. Getting final confirmation of successful drilling is incredibly gratifying. For the sampling team, this is the equivalent of the landing team going crazy after the successful touchdown.
To wrap up with one further piece of geek excitement. On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 257,885,161-1, was discovered on Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer Curtis Cooper’s computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits. With 360,000 CPUs peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, 17th-year GIMPS is the longest continuously-running global “grassroots supercomputing”project in Internet history.
Until next week’s Australian Science review, go geekily crazy and enjoy your weekend.
Ah, the weekend! Time to kick back, relax, and look back over everything that’s happened over the past few days. And I’m rather happy to say that some quite interesting things have happened, including the Leonid meteor shower which peaked on Friday night (though if you step outside after dark and watch the sky, you may still see a few stragglers). So what else has caught my eye this week, science-wise?
Well first off, the Curiosity Rover has been busy over on the planet next door. I can’t help but find everything about the Curiosity rover exciting, especially as it’s paving the way for actual manned exploration to another planet. As many people will agree, no matter how sophisticated a rover can be, it will never be as good as a team of properly equipped geologists exploring a site in person. As it turns out, this idea just came a step closer to being reality…
The findings demonstrate that Mars’ atmosphere, though just 1 percent as thick as that of Earth, does provide a significant amount of shielding from dangerous, fast-moving cosmic particles.
Some people may recall the death of an aged tortoise nicknamed Lonesome George, so called because he was thought to be the last surviving member of his species. I know I do, and was rather saddened by it. While it may be an inescapable part of the way life on our planet works, there’s something quite humbling about being forced to simply watch a species go extinct and not be able to do anything about it. But then, was George’s death really the end of the story? As it happens, perhaps not…
“These giant tortoises are of crucial importance to the ecosystems of the Galapagos Islands, and the reintroduction of these species will help preserve their evolutionary legacy,” said Danielle Edwards, postdoctoral research associate at Yale and lead author on the study.
Lisa Grossman at New Scientist discusses the phenomenon of rogue planets – planets roaming interstellar space after being forcibly ejected from their home systems. It’s a concept which I’ve thought about in great detail in the past, as have many others, including astrophysicists, astrobiologists, and science fiction authors.
The wanderers are no longer gravitationally linked, but they are headed in the same direction. “Like when you kick a clod of sand, the grains don’t stick together anymore but they have the same common motion,” Delorme says.
In chemistry, I’ve always held a certain fascination with noble gas compounds. Molecules formed from atoms which aren’t supposed to react and form molecules always seemed rather exotic and curious. Several of these compounds have been predicted involving Xenon, one of the heaviest noble gasses. And there may be a lot of Xenon trapped inside the Earth this way…
“In addition to providing a likely solution to the missing xenon paradox and clarifying essential aspects of xenon chemistry, our study may result in practical applications,” says [Artem R.] Oganov. “For example, the ability of xenon to form strong chemical bonds with oxygen and other elements, and to be trapped in crystalline defects, suggests their use as non-classical luminescence centers and active sites for catalysis”.
And to end on a humourous note, XKCD wrote a comic this week describing the Apollo Spacecraft and Saturn V rockets using only the 1000 most commonly used words in the English language. The result was slightly hilarious and rather enlightening about how often writers like myself use words which aren’t in that top 1000. A testament to XKCD’s popularity is how many people in the online space and astronomy communities mentioned it – including at least one astronaut!
Lots of fire comes out here. This end should point toward the ground if you want to go into space. If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you will not go into space today.
Keri Bean in the NASA JPL Mars Yard, with the Curiosity test-bed twin ‘Maggie’
Keri Bean is a meteorologist specialising in the atmospherics of other planets. She is on the team operating the Curiosity Rover for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission. Prior to MSL, Keri has had roles in the missions for other Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, a prototype Moon rover, the Phoenix Mars Lander, and the Hubble Space telescope. And she’s just 25 years old! That’s a pretty incredible CV to rack up already.
In this interview, Keri talks with me about her work on MSL and the other missions, plus how and why she got into space science. It all started when a tornado hit her pre-school.
Keri (centre) with many of the MSL team and ‘Scarecrow’, the other Curiosity test rover (Scarecrow is lighter than Curiosity so that it mirrors the lower Mars gravity).
A GIF of the partial solar eclipse by Mars moon Phobos, as captured by the Curiosity rover—an image capture task coordinated by Keri.
A photo of Phobos (highly zoomed it, and hence quite grainy) taken by Curiosity just after dusk on 21 September using one of its Mastcams, showing its ‘potato’ shape.
The ‘Chariot’ Lunar rover prototype for which Keri worked on camera design (and which James May managed to have a minor accident with when filming an episode of Top Gear!).
Doesn’t time fly? I don’t know about anyone else, but my week has absolutely flown past. As I take a moment to relax and consider picking a few favourite topics from this week’s news, I realise that perhaps this is because it’s been an exciting week, full of interesting discoveries and unusual events. In fact, I’ve had quite a lot to choose from, but I eventually managed to trim it down to these few articles which particularly caught my eye…
First and foremost, a planet has been discovered in our neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri. This is something which I find thrilling for various personal reasons. An interesting discussion of the discovery itself and some of its implications are given by Paul Gilster in the blog Centauri Dreams:
There was a sense of exhilaration in the air on Tuesday as the buzz around an Alpha Centauri planet built, and when the embargo was lifted, reports of the find filled the social media as the early articles began to appear online. Just how big a deal is Centauri B b? A skeptic could point out that while finding an Earth-mass planet is significant, it must still be confirmed, and in any case, this is an Earth-mass planet that is nothing like a clement, habitable world.
From a neighbouring star to a neighbouring planet, the Curiosity rover has been finding some very curious shiny objects in the martian soil. Wired Science gives a brief overview of what’s been happening on the red planet:
NASA’s Curiosity rover took three scoops from a small Martian sand dune and found several bright particles in the soil. Scientists think these are unrelated to the odd bright object that Curiosity saw last week, which turned out to be plastic that fell from the probe, and are probably indigenous Martian mineral flecks.
Closer to home, this week saw a world record being broken by Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner, who leapt from a balloon at an altitude of 39 km. A fantastic achievement and a daredevil stunt! However, could more of an effort have been made to add some depth to the stunt and give us all some more background about it? Science historian Amy Shira Teitel at Vintage Space takes a detailed look at the full background and a few tricks which were missed with respect to communicating the science behind such a stunt:
In the 1960s, pilots were pushing the envelope of supersonic flight at high altitudes. But this was a dangerous approach. While it’s easy to fly fast in the thin upper atmosphere it’s harder to control an aircraft. With no air for control surfaces to push against, aircraft tend to tumble, and when aircraft tumble pilots tend to eject. Tests with dummies showed that when falling from high altitudes, human bodies tended to get into a flat spin. It would be like rolling down a hill really fast but without the hill, and the G-forces would certainly be fatal.
Image: AP Photo/Red Bull Stratos, Luke Aikins
And finally, there was a rather informative little discussion piece by Dave Hone in the blog Lost Worlds. In emphasising some of the difficulties faced in palaeontology, he poses a rhetorical question – did Tyrannosaurus Rex have feathers?
Note that there is a rather important scientific distinction here, no facts have changed since the 70s, but we have many more facts. And the best interpretation of all of the available data is now a little different to that which we had before. The fossil record is incomplete and we have to extrapolate from the available evidence and apply parsimony the best way we can.
It’s been an interesting week for science news, and I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to give this week’s science picks! This made me spend a little while sipping contemplatively on a cup of vanilla iced coffee and wondering where to even start…
The articles I’ve selected are, of course, slanted towards my own (rather geeky) interests, but all the same I hope you find them all as fascinating as I did!
First up, the news that Star Trek style warp drives may actually be possible, at least in theory, made me exclaim “Oh wow!” out loud. Fortunately, people who spend any time with me are generally used to me talking to myself while staring at a computer screen…
“Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light. But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light.”
– Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar
Artists impression of Mimivirus, the first giant virus to be discovered. Image Credit: InvaderXan/Wikimedia Commons
From the vastness of space to life under the microscope, biologists have been debating for years whether or not viruses qualify as a form of life. The latest evidence is that they may indeed be a life form in their own right, and an old one at that!
They found that many of the most ancient protein folds in living organisms were present in the giant viruses, which “offers more evidence that viruses are embedded in the fabric of life,” Caetano-Anollés said.
Heritage Daily had a fascinating article about the archaeology of the future, and what precisely our distant descendents may one day think of us and the way we lived…
The point is that most of what survives will not be determined by conscious decisions on our part. This may not be for want of trying, as shown by the current popularity of time capsules. The most impressive of these must be the KEO satellite, due to be launched in 2014 and to return to Earth 50,000 years later.
And speaking of what we know of the past, it’s been shown again and again that our primitive relatives, the neanderthals, were likely not the brainless savages they’re often depicted to be. Evidence suggests that neanderthals liked to collect bird feathers as ornaments.
“I think this is the tip of the iceberg,” said Prof Finlayson: “It is showing that Neanderthals simply expressed themselves in media other than cave walls. The last bastion of defence in favour of our superiority was cognition.” Neanderthals, he said, may have been “different”, but “their processes of thinking were obviously very similar”.
Curiosity self-portrait. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
As the Curiosity rover settles into its new home in Gale Crater on our neighbouring planet, one small worry is growing in the backs of the minds of certain NASA scientists. Could a blunder on the part of some engineers lead to Curiosity contaminating the surface of Mars with Earth life?
John D. Rummel, a professor of biology at East Carolina University, said, partly in jest: “It will be a sad day for NASA if they do detect ice or water. That’s because the Curiosity project will most likely be told, ‘Gee, that’s nice. Now turn around.’ “
And finally, planet hunters are scouring the sky for exoplanets. Astrobiologists are hoping to soon be able to look into the atmospheres of those planets in search of life signs, in the form of certain molecules created by living organisms. But could they be fooled by those molecules coming from somewhere else?
One key gas astrobiologists looking for extraterrestrial life would concentrate on would be oxygen […] Another possibility would be methane, a colorless, odorless, flammable organic gas that microbes on Earth produce. Seeing both together in an exoplanet’s atmosphere might be an especially significant sign of life, since they would both ordinarily remove each other from the atmosphere without something like life to constantly replenish them.
August was a momentous month for science and technology. In my top five events are: NASA landed a car-sized rover on Mars; the first man to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong dies; Harvard scientist create a cyborg tissue; Swedish researchers detail how Parkinson’s disease spreads through the brain; and Voyager 2 turns 35.
Without a doubt the technology achievement of the month goes to NASA. They landed the rover, Curiosity, successfully on Mars at 1:31 a.m. EDT August 6, 2012. Ending a 36-week flight and beginning a two-year investigation. What makes this noteworthy? For one the coverage and access NASA provided in real time. From the launch to the daily updates to the ‘on the spot’ coverage of the entrance-descent-landing sequence live from the Pasadena control-room. Showing that engineers and scientists are human after all.
I was delighted to see the sky-crane landing working to perfection. As the system were all bought to life one-by-one the science exploration staff are eagerly anticipating zapping, sampling and analysing rocks, regolith and atmosphere.
Curiosity parachuting to the Martian surface. Photo credit NASA/JPL.
“Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars. Curiosity, the most sophisticated rover ever built, is now on the surface of the Red Planet, where it will seek to answer age-old questions about whether life ever existed on Mars, or if the planet can sustain life in the future,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “This is an amazing achievement, made possible by a team of scientists and engineers from around the world and led by the extraordinary men and women of NASA and our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. President Obama has laid out a bold vision for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030’s, and today’s landing marks a significant step toward achieving this goal.”
The bold vision for sending humans to Mars was poignant. Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, died, following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures. He was 82. Without a doubt Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were childhood heroes to me. They along with the other astronauts of both the Apollo and Gemini missions were a key inspiration in firstly my interest in and secondly my career in science.
The only picture taken of Neil Armstrong on the Moon. Neil was carrying the camera (seen in his hands here) during the entire moon-walk so all images captures Buzz Aldrin. This image was captured by a stationary camera on the Lunar landing module. Image credit NASA.
“Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed,” Armstrong said, telling a tense and waiting Earth that men had finally reached the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong was also a reluctant American hero who always believed he was just doing his job. A refreshing change from the current days of hyped useless celebrities and where the word awesome is applies to every mundane activity. Traveling to the Moon, that inspires a sense of awe.
Meanwhileresearchers at Harvard have grown cyborg tissues with embedded nanoelectronics. They have reported how they developed a system for creating nanoscale “scaffolds” which could be seeded with cells which later grow into tissue.
Though a number of potential applications exist for the technology, the most near-term use may come from the pharmaceutical industry. Researchers could use it to more precisely study how newly developed drugs act in three-dimensional tissues, rather than thin layers of cultured cells. The system might also one day be used to monitor changes inside the body and react accordingly, whether through electrical stimulation or the release of a drug.
Parkinson’s researchers at Lund University for the first time were able to follow events in which misfolded proteins travel from sick to healthy cells. This model has never before been identified so clearly in a living organism. The experiments also show how the transferred proteins attract proteins in the host cell leading to abnormal folding or “clumping” inside the cells. This is a cellular process likely to lead to the disease process as Parkinson’s progresses, and it spreads to an increasing number of brain regions as the patient gets sicker.
The aim of the research is to better understand how Parkinson’s pathology progresses and thereby uncover novel molecular targets for disease-modifying treatments.
Voyager 1. Image credit NASA/JPL
Finally what an inspiring longevity story. Thirty-five years ago, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, the first Voyager spacecraft to launch, departed on a journey that would make it the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune and the longest-operating NASA spacecraft ever. Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, that launched 16 days later on Sept. 5, 1977, are still going strong, hurtling away from our sun. Mission managers are eagerly anticipating the day when they break on through to the other side – the space between stars.
I trust you have enjoyed my idiosyncratic “five best new science and technology” stories of this past calender month. These were in most cases, but not exclusively so, announced through peer reviewed journals. These were those that I found most interesting, or influential, or of possible future impact. No science applied to my choice, the choice was my responsibility alone!
NASA’s rover Curiosity was safely on Mars. It was a perfect landing. The novel sky-crane method had proved its detractors wrong and its designers right. What was needed then was signs that Curiosity was working as designed. NASA had said that the first pictures may be anything up to 2 hours after landing. A long time for the audiences, waiting, live, all over Earth.
It's a wheel on Mars. Photo credit NASA/JPL
“Got thumbnails.” Pause in the control centre, then someone else yells “Its a wheel, its a wheel!” “A wheel on Mars!” For the second time that momentous afternoon the NASA/Jet propulsion Lab crowd erupted into spontaneous and joyful applause. Not only had they landed the rover, Curiosity, safely on Mars, they had received the first images back from its cameras. Sometimes the unscripted, unexpurgated exclamations make for the best history.
The first two pictures were from the front and back navigation cameras. They were low resolution black and white thumbnails taken through the dust caps that protected the cameras during landing. As the minutes ticked by higher resolution images came through from the rover. The business as usual, familiar image enhancement bought into sharp clarity the ‘first’ two images from the robot explorer.
The 'first' image enhanced view from the rear hazard camera, Mars Curiosity Sol 0.
The first week on Mars
After the exuberance and press conference came the trademark NASA precision and methodical approach. An approach that gets missions safely to Mars, at the same time can make the audacious appear mundane.
Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, are now checking out Curiosity’s subsystems and 10 instruments. Curiosity is in the opening days of a two-year mission to investigate whether conditions have been favorable for microbial life and preserving clues in the rocks about possible past life.
Mission team members are “living” on Mars time. A Martian day is approximately 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, meaning team members start their shift 40 minutes later each day.
View of Mount Sharp, Curiosity's roving destination. Image credit NASA/JPL
Amongst the important system events in this first week was a software upgrade. It took four days to successfully upgrade Curiosity’s software in its main and back-up computer. The software had been uploaded during its trek to Mars, but not activated until now. The software to date was focused on getting Curiosity through the Martian atmosphere and safely to its destination in Gale Crater. The software upgrade is to cover its surface exploration activity, roving and controlling the various scientific instruments.
Curiosity Ready to Roll
“There will be a lot of important firsts that will be taking place for Curiosity over the next few weeks, but the first motion of its wheels, the first time our roving laboratory on Mars does some actual roving, that will be something special,” said Michael Watkins, mission manager for Curiosity from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Mission engineers are devoting more time to planning the first rove of Curiosity. In the coming days, the rover will exercise each of its four steerable (front and back) wheels, turning each of them side-to-side before ending up with each wheel pointing straight ahead. On a later day, the rover will drive forward about one rover-length 3 metres, turn 90 degrees, and then kick into reverse for about 2 metres. Exciting times for the rover driver team!
This image shows the landing site of NASA's Curiosity rover and destinations scientists want to investigate. Photo credit NASA/JPL
The scientists and engineers of NASA’s Curiosity rover mission have selected the first driving destination for Curiosity. The target area, named Glenelg, is a natural intersection of three kinds of terrain. The trek to Glenelg will send the rover 400 metres east-southeast of its landing site. One of the three types of terrain intersecting at Glenelg is layered bedrock, which is attractive as the first drilling target.
The choice described by Curiosity Principal Investigator John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology as, “With such a great landing spot in Gale Crater, we literally had every degree of the compass to choose from for our first drive.” “We had a bunch of strong contenders. It is the kind of dilemma planetary scientists dream of, but you can only go one place for the first drilling for a rock sample on Mars. That first drilling will be a huge moment in the history of Mars exploration.”
Grotzinger estimated the rover’s journey would take between three weeks and two months to arrive at Glenelg, where it will stay for roughly a month before heading to the base of Mount Sharp.
It may be a full year before the remote-controlled rover gets to the base of the peak, which is within 20 kilometres of the rover’s landing site.
Zapping rocks and doing science
Before Curiosity heads off to Glenelg another first will occur. The team in charge of Curiosity’s Chemistry and Camera instrument, is planning to give their mast-mounted, rock-zapping laser and telescope combination a thorough checkout. ChemCam has “zapped” its first rock in the name of planetary science. It was the first time such a powerful laser has been used on the surface of another world.
The Chemistry Camera calibration target, as seen by the camera. Photo credit NASA/JPL.
The technique is called ‘laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy’. The high-powered, narrow-focused, laser beam vaporises the rock from a distance generating a plasma plume with temperatures in excess of 100,000°C. At the high temperatures during the early plasma, the vaporised material breaks down into excited ionic and atomic species. As it cools to 5,000–20,000°C the characteristic atomic emission lines of the elements can be recorded by the camera. This data is compared to the ‘standards’ that the rover carries to identify the rock components.
The soon to be famous rock N165, target for testing the Chemistry Camera laser and analysis. Photo credit NASA/JPL.
As Roger Wiens, principal investigator of the ChemCam instrument from the Los Alamos National Laboratory explained earlier, “Rock N165 looks like your typical Mars rock, about three inches wide. It’s about 10 feet away.” “We are going to hit it with 14 millijoules of energy 30 times in 10 seconds. It is not only going to be an excellent test of our system, it should be pretty cool too.”
Pretty cool indeed.
First weather report in 30 years
It is currently just above freezing point in gale Crater where Curiosity is.
Grotzinger noted the team’s report on the Martian crater’s temperature was “really an important benchmark for Mars science”.
“It’s been exactly 30 years since the last long duration monitoring weather station was present on Mars,” when Viking 1 stopped communicating with Earth in 1982,” he said. Then Viking 1 lander recorded temperatures that varied from −17.2 °C to −107 °C.
Sensors on two finger-like mini-booms extending horizontally from the mast of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity will monitor wind speed, wind direction and air temperature. One also will monitor humidity; the other also will monitor ground temperature. The sensors are part of the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, provided by Spain for the Mars Science Laboratory mission.
The weather station devices on Curiosity being tested prior to launch. Photo credit NASA/JPL.
In this image, the spacecraft specialist’s hands are just below one of the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station mini-booms. The other mini-boom extends to the left a little farther up the mast.
As Curiosity’s primary mission is for a full Martian year it will be able to record the seasonal variations that occur for Mars.
On the ground radiation monitoring and weather conditions will be crucial for any future exploration or habitation by humans. This mission by Curiosity represents an important step towards these aspirations.
This is the first 360-degree panorama in color of the Gale Crater landing site taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The panorama was made from thumbnail versions of images taken by the Mast Camera.
Scientists will take a closer look at several splotches in the foreground that appear gray. These areas show the effects of the descent stage’s rocket engines blasting the ground. What appeared as a dark strip of dunes in previous, black-and-white pictures from Curiosity can be seen along the top of this mosaic, but the color images also reveal additional shades of reddish brown around the dunes, likely indicating different textures or materials.
The images were taken on Aug. 9, 2012, by the 34-millimeter Mast Camera. This panorama mosaic was made of 130 images of 144 by 144 pixels each. Selected full frames from this panorama, which are 1,200 by 1,200 pixels each, are expected to be transmitted to Earth later. The images in this panorama were brightened in the processing. Mars only receives half the sunlight Earth does and this image was taken in the late Martian afternoon.
Mars is full of secrets and mysteries. The classic definition of a desert world, our planet’s arid sibling is a parched wilderness of dunes and planetwide dust storms. With a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and only 38% the gravitational pull of Earth, there are a lot of puzzles about this cold and frosty little planet, and a lot of scientists who are longing to solve them.
El Dorado, Gusev Crater. Mars is a world of dust and dunes…
By now, anyone keeping up with the news is bound to have heard that NASA’s Curiosity rover made a flawless descent through the atmosphere of Mars and is now busy eyeing up its new home in the Gale Crater. As was discussed previously here on Australian Science, a big question still on everyone’s mind is the same one which David Bowie sang about back in 1971. Is there life on Mars? However, it seems that NASA’s plans are not to answer this question directly. John Grotzinger, project scientist for the Curiosity mission, is quoted as saying; “Curiosity is not a life detection mission. We’re not actually looking for life; we don’t have the ability to detect life if it was there.” Instead, the main objective of Curiosity is to look for signs of life.
The trouble is that looking for life directly is a difficult task. Back here on Earth, new discoveries are still being made frequently, with life being found in environments and habitats where no one was expecting. There’s a lot which we still don’t fully understand about life here on our own world. When we’re talking about another planet, it’s safe to say that all bets are off. As a result, Curiosity’s goal is to look for the various elements and chemical compounds which life might use – or might have used once upon a time when the planet may have been more hospitable. The focus has shifted from the search for life on Mars right now, to life which may once have lived there.
Arabia Terra – one of the three locations on Mars where methane plumes have been spotted.
One point which is worth remembering right now, however, is that there’s one big unsolved mystery about Mars. A gaseous mystery. Large quantities of methane have been detected in the martian atmosphere, which gives rise to a real puzzle. Methane is destroyed by sunlight, and with the thin atmosphere found on Mars, any methane should be rapidly broken apart by solar ultraviolet. The only possible conclusion is that the methane seen on Mars is being replenished somehow. There are only really two possibilities for how this might happen.
One scenario sees the martian methane caused by a geological process called serpentinisation. This is where a type of mineral known as olivine (more familiar to us as the gemstone peridot) chemically reacts with water and carbon dioxide. The reaction creates methane and a green mineral called serpentine (commonly found in certain parts of Western Australia and Tasmania), and releases methane gas. If this is the process which is occurring, it would mean that not only is there a suitable amount of water somewhere under the surface of Mars, but there must also be geological activity for that water to continue being brought into contact with further olivine to react with. This would suggest that there are things which we don’t know about current geological processes on Mars.
The other possibility, more radically, is that this methane is being produced by life. Here on Earth, bacteria known as methanogens are responsible for most of the methane present in Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, on Earth, methane is so regularly produced by living organisms that it can used as an indicator of biological activity.
When three distinct plumes of methane were discovered on Mars in 2009, it was noted that there was an equal probability of either of those two scenarios being the source of the methane – and that both would be huge revelations in our understanding of our neighbouring world. So maybe the Curiosity rover isn’t set up to hunt for life, and maybe it won’t be directly looking for it. But I, for one, do hope it finds some clues about the origin of the mysterious martian methane. Just as any scientist should, I love a good mystery!
The three methane plumes seen on Mars at South-East Syrtis Major, Nili Fossae and Arabia Terra.
Image credits:
Top – NASA JPL/Cornell
Middle – ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
Bottom – NASA
This view of the landscape to the north of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on the afternoon of the first day after landing. (The team calls this day Sol 1, which is the first Martian day of operations; Sol 1 began on Aug. 6, 2012.)
In the distance, the image shows the north wall and rim of Gale Crater. The image is murky because the MAHLI’s removable dust cover is apparently coated with dust blown onto the camera during the rover’s terminal descent. Images taken without the dust cover in place are expected during checkout of the robotic arm in coming weeks.
First Color Image of the Martian Landscape Returned from Curiosity
The MAHLI is located on the turret at the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm. At the time the MAHLI Sol 1 image was acquired, the robotic arm was in its stowed position. It has been stowed since the rover was packaged for its Nov. 26, 2011, launch.
The MAHLI has a transparent dust cover. This image was acquired with the dust cover closed. The cover will not be opened until more than a week after the landing.
When the robotic arm, turret, and MAHLI are stowed, the MAHLI is in a position that is rotated 30 degrees relative to the rover deck. The MAHLI image shown here has been rotated to correct for that tilt, so that the sky is “up” and the ground is “down”.
When the robotic arm, turret, and MAHLI are stowed, the MAHLI is looking out from the front left side of the rover. This is much like the view from the driver’s side of cars sold in the USA.
The main purpose of Curiosity’s MAHLI camera is to acquire close-up, high-resolution views of rocks and soil at the rover’s Gale Crater field site. The camera is capable of focusing on any target at distances of about 0.8 inch (2.1 centimeters) to infinity. This means it can, as shown here, also obtain pictures of the Martian landscape.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
Matt Heverly during testing of rover double "Scarecrow" in the desert near Death Valley. Source: Daily Mail UK
When the Mars Science Laboratory – Curiosity – touches down on Mars today, one of the people there ready to take control of it will be Matt Heverly.
Matt is an engineer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and has been working on the design and build of Curiosity, as well as being one of the drivers of the lone surviving rover currently on Mars – Opportunity.
And Matt has been appointed by NASA as the lead driver for Curiosity.
Last week I interviewed Matt about this important role, about driving rovers in general, and about the science work that he’ll be helping with.
When Matt came online, he’d quite literally been in the “Mars Yard” conducting some testing with Curiosity’s twin, and he had parked it right behind himself before joining me on Skype. You can see the rover in the background.
(There are a couple of spots where the Skype signal dropped down and a warning dialogue came over the screen. I wanted to get the interview posted prior to the landing day, so no finessing the video editing…)
There are actually two “twins” of Curiosity used for testing back here on Earth. The one behind Matt is an exact twin is all respects except the plutonium power supply. The other – nicknamed Scarecrow – is a slimmed down version that is designed to weigh as much as Curiosity would in the lower gravity of Mars. It is used to test driving conditions. The following video shows you Scarecrow in action in the Mars Yard:
We also talked about Athlete – a rover design originally destined for the Moon. Check this video of Athlete busting some moves:
Australian geologist Marion Anderson, with a model of Curiosity's predecessor rover Opportunity. Source: The Age
You’ve sunk more than $2 billion into a car-sized rover and you’re ready to send it to explore Mars. But where exactly on Mars do you send it?
Of course you want it and its controllers back here to be able to do the best possible science. So apparently that is exactly what NASA did – consulted the geology scientists of the world.
One of those scientists was Marion Anderson of Melbourne’s Monash University.
In this interview recorded on 2 August 2012, Marion explains to me what went into the selection of Gale Crater as the landing site for the Mars Curiosity rover, what to expect from the rover as it begins to explore the crater after its landing there on Monday 6 August, and why Curiosity is NOT looking for life, despite what many media people are saying (running time 20 mins).
Marion also talks about her role in selecting the landing sites for those other Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and where next after Mars?
If you are interested in learning more about the geology of Mars, I highly recommend the one-hour lecture by Richard Pogge titled The Deserts of Marsfrom an entire – free – university course in Astrobiology from Ohio State University (also available on iTunes).
In the interview you’ll hear Marion talk about how Mount Sharp in the centre of Gale Crater is actually higher than the surrounding crater walls – some five kilometres high. In this lecture, listen for an explanation why Olympus Mons is the highest volcanic cone in our Solar System, and probably explaining the height of Mount Sharp too.
Doesn’t time fly? I don’t know about anyone else, but my week has absolutely flown past. As I take a moment to relax and consider picking a few favourite topics from this week’s news, I realise that perhaps this is because it’s been an exciting week, full of interesting discoveries and unusual events. In fact, I’ve had quite a lot to choose from, but I eventually managed to trim it down to these few articles which particularly caught my eye…
It’s been an interesting week for science news, and I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to give this week’s science picks! This made me spend a little while sipping contemplatively on a cup of vanilla iced coffee and wondering where to even start…
