Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - August 6, 2013 and JSC Today

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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: August 6, 2013 6:24:01 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - August 6, 2013 and JSC Today

 

 

 

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

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JSC TODAY CATEGORIES Headlines -  Shuttle Knowledge Console (SKC) v6.0 Organizations/Social -  What is JSAT? -  Starport Massage Special - $55 for 60 (M-Th) -  Beginners Ballroom Dance - Discount Ends Friday Jobs and Training -  250 MOD Online Training Lessons and Still Growing -  Tomorrow: NASA Privacy Training Session -  FedTraveler Live Lab - Aug. 7 -  Sensorimotor Function and Spaceflight -  Space Available! Travel Reporting Hands-on Class -  Driving Innovation at JSC -  August RLLS Portal Education Series WebEx Training

Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong

 

Headlines Shuttle Knowledge Console (SKC) v6.0 The JSC Chief Knowledge Officer is pleased to announce the sixth release of SKC. This release includes: SFOC closeout lessons learned file New KBR data - including Columbia update USA engineering knowledge base data archive Georgia Tech Shuttle Symposium videos New shuttle documents scanned in Search: We have updated the search to be more precise. If you perform a search from a particular area of the site, or from a particular folder, the search will only include content from that part of the site. If would like to search the whole site, repeat the search by clearing the search box and re-typing your keywords on the search page. To date, 2.38 TB of information, with 5.48 million documents of Space Shuttle Program knowledge, has been captured. Click the "Submit Feedback" button located on the top of the site navigation to give us your comments and thoughts. Brent J. Fontenot x36456 https://skc.jsc.nasa.gov/Home.aspx [top]    Organizations/Social What is JSAT? The JSC Safety and Health Action Team (JSAT) is a team designed specifically for you and a team that thrives on employee participation. JSAT is your voice, and the monthly meeting is available to all at JSC, Ellington Field and Sonny Carter Training Facility employees. Please read about JSAT, and we hope to see you at a meeting! Brandy Ingram x46533 [top] Starport Massage Special - $55 for 60 (M-Th) Starport is offering another amazing massage special to the JSC community! Any one-hour massage booked online in August will be $55 when scheduled on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Starport Massage - $55 for 60 | Monday through Thursday $55 for a 60-minute massage Must be booked Monday through Thursday Must be booked online in August Massage must be physically scheduled between Aug. 1 and Nov. 30 Starport's Massage Therapists -- Marj Moore, LMT Tuesdays and Thursdays | 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Every other Saturday | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Click here to book with Marj -- Anette Lemon, LMT Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays | 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Every other Saturday | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Click here to book with Anette Book your massage today! Steve Schade x30304 http://www.innerspaceclearlake.com/massage.php [top] Beginners Ballroom Dance - Discount Ends Friday Do you feel like you have two left feet? Well, Starport has the perfect spring program for you: Beginners Ballroom Dance! This eight-week class introduces you to the various types of ballroom dance. Students will learn the secrets of a good lead and following, as well as the ability to identify the beat of the music. This class is easy, and we have fun as we learn. JSC friends and family are welcome. Discounted registration: $90 per couple (ends Friday, Aug. 9) Regular registration: $110 per couple (Aug. 10 to 20) Two class sessions available: Tuesdays from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. -- Starting Aug. 20 Thursdays from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. -- Starting Aug. 22 All classes are taught in the Gilruth Center's dance studio. Steve Schade x30304 http://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/Fitness/RecreationClasses/RecreationProgram... [top]    Jobs and Training 250 MOD Online Training Lessons and Still Growing Interested in learning more about spaceflight mission operations in a convenient, self-paced online format? The Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) Online Training Lessons library hosts our continually growing catalog of crew and flight controller training videos, interactive activities and classroom-based lessons. From the Apollo program's lessons learned to emergency operations on the International Space Station, these lessons cover a wide variety of engaging and educational content. Visit our online lessons website to access the library of more than 250 lessons. Since 2011 we have had more than 45,000 viewers. New lessons are added on a regular basis, so be sure to visit our website often to view a new spotlight lesson developed using the latest training techniques. To learn more about what we do, watch our online training showcase video that highlights the formats and templates used to create our lessons. Les Court x47131 https://mod2.jsc.nasa.gov/da7/OnLineLessons/lessons.aspx [top] Tomorrow: NASA Privacy Training Session Protecting sensitive information at NASA begins and ends with our employees. Several incidents this year resulted in the loss, theft and compromise of sensitive and personal data. The agency wants employees, civil servants and contractors, to be knowledgeable about handling and protecting Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII). SBU and PII can be anything from names to personnel records to non-classified sensitive material. JSC's Information Resources Directorate is providing the following training sessions, open to all JSC employees: Wednesday, Aug. 7, 9 to 10:30 a.m., Building 12, Room 152 (60 participants max) Thursday, Aug. 29, 1 to 2:30 p.m., Teague Auditorium You do not need to pre-register for these events, but it's first come, first served. There will be a sheet for you to sign in on. For more information, click here or contact JSC's Privacy Manager Ali Montasser (x39798) or JSC's Information Security Officer Mark Fridye (x36660). JSC IRD Outreach x39798 http://ird.jsc.nasa.gov/ [top] FedTraveler Live Lab - Aug. 7 Do you need some hands-on, personal help with FedTraveler.com? Join the Business Systems and Process Improvement Office for a FedTraveler Live Lab tomorrow, Aug. 7, any time between 9 a.m. and noon in Building 12, Room 142. Our help desk representatives will be available to help you work through travel processes and learn more about using FedTraveler during this informal workshop. Bring your current travel documents or specific questions that you have about the system and join us for some hands-on, in-person help with the FedTraveler. If you'd like to sign up for this FedTraveler Live Lab, please log into SATERN and register. For additional information, please contact Judy Seier at x32771. To register in SATERN, please click on this SATERN direct link: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_... Gina Clenney x39851 [top] Sensorimotor Function and Spaceflight Spaceflight is known to cause alterations in multiple physiological systems, including changes in sensorimotor function. This presentation will discuss the sensorimotor changes that astronauts experience after long-duration exposure to microgravity and the current work being done to develop countermeasures to mitigate these alterations. Please join the Human Systems Academy for this lecture on Aug. 9 from 2 to 3 p.m. Space is limited, so register in SATERN today! https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_... Cynthia Rando x41815 https://sashare.jsc.nasa.gov/hsa/default.aspx [top] Space Available! Travel Reporting Hands-on Class There is still space available! As part of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer subject-matter expert course series, Todd Hegemier will demonstrate a new online tool that allows you to access easy-to-understand travel reporting. This tool is intended for proactive technical managers, branch chiefs, project leads, resources analysts and administrative professionals to help respond to travel trends, monitor attendance to specific events, evaluate average cost per trip and much more. Hegemier will provide hands-on instruction on how to access the travel reports and explanations of the available data. This one-hour course is open to both civil servants and contractors. It will be offered on Thursday, Aug. 8, from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. in Building 12, Room 144, and via WebEx. Register in SATERN by Aug. 6 via the links below: Classroom instruction (Building 12, Room 144) - SATERN direct link: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_... WebEx - SATERN direct link: https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=SCHEDULED_... Event Date: Thursday, August 8, 2013   Event Start Time:9:30 AM   Event End Time:10:30 AM Event Location: B12-144 Add to Calendar Nancy Miyamoto x30568 [top] Driving Innovation at JSC Driving Innovation at JSC - Sept. 11 to 12 Individuals in technical organizations are invited to join Dr. Joel Sercel as he explores breakthrough ideas that leaders need to create successful systems for the future. This program combines marketing, product development, technology assessment, value-chain design, project execution and talent management in an integrated architecture for achieving breakthrough performance. You will gain the capability to help position your organization for future sustainment, growth, and adaptation to new technologies, business models and missions. Sign up today! https://satern.nasa.gov/learning/user/deeplink_redirect.jsp?linkId=REGISTRATI... Diane Kutchinski x46490 [top] August RLLS Portal Education Series WebEx Training The August weekly RLLS Portal Education series: Aug. 7 and 8 - Transportation Request at 7:30 a.m., Visa Information at 2 p.m. CDT Aug. 14 and 15 - Flight Arrival Departure at 7:30 a.m., Lodging Request at 2 p.m. CDT Aug. 21 - Transportation Request at 2 p.m. CDT The 30-minute training sessions are computer-based WebEx sessions, offering individuals the convenience to join from their own workstation. The training will cover the following: System login Locating support modules Locating downloadable instructions Creating support requests Submittal requirements Submitting on behalf of another Adding attachments Selecting special requirements Submitting a request Status of a request Ending each session, there will opportunities for questions and answers. Please remember that TTI will no longer accept requests for U.S.-performed services unless they are submitted through the RLLS Portal. Email or call 281-335-8565 to sign up. James Welty 281-335-8565 https://www.tti-portal.com [top]

 

JSC Today is compiled periodically as a service to JSC employees on an as-submitted basis. Any JSC organization or employee may submit articles. Disclaimer: Accuracy and content of these notes are the responsibility of the submitters.

 

 

 

 

 

NASA TV:

·         9:45 am Central (10:45 EDT) – Curiosity: First Year on Mars

·         11 am Central (Noon EDT) – "Curiosity's First Year on Mars: The Path to Future Robotic & Human Exploration"

·         Noon Central (1 pm EDT) – E36's Karen Nyberg & Chris Cassidy mark Curiosity's anniv.

 

Human Spaceflight News

Tuesday – August 6, 2013

 

HEADLINES AND LEADS

 

Lori Garver Leaving NASA for Air Line Pilots Association

 

Brian Berger - Space News

 

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver is stepping down Sept. 6 to take the top staff job at the Washington-based Air Line Pilots Association, SpaceNews has confirmed. A formal announcement is expected Tuesday. Garver informed colleagues of her decision in an Aug. 5 email. "After quite an extensive decision process, I have decided to make a career change. I will be resigning from my position as NASA Deputy Administrator, effective September 6 and have accepted a new position in the private sector outside the space industry," Garver wrote. "NASA will be sending out a formal announcement tomorrow with all the details. It has been great working with you all these years and I'm sure that our paths will continue to cross."

 

NASA Wants New Framework, Partnerships for Asteroid Initiatives

 

Irene Klotz – Space News

 

NASA is casting a wide net to flesh out a multipurpose, politically viable asteroid exploration initiative that serves scientists while simultaneously preparing for an eventual human expedition to Mars. Its latest salvo was a purposely ambiguous solicitation for ideas about how to find all asteroids that threaten humanity and what to do about them. NASA already has been working on the first part of that project. Its Near-Earth Objects (NEO) Observations Program, currently funded at $20.5 million, already has found about 95 percent of the larger asteroids — those with a diameter of 1 kilometer or larger — in orbits that pass near Earth. NASA plans a public meeting in Houston Sept. 30–Oct. 2 to discuss the asteroid proposals.

 

Gardens in space:

How microalgae and flat panel reactors could sustain life

 

Fabian Schmidt - Deutsche Welle

 

If man ever wants to walk on Mars, a lot of food and oxygen will be required on the way. Producing it all while on the journey - in space - now seems like a viable option. It's still sounds like science fiction - but one day, space travelers could be flying to Mars. The moon too keeps plenty of researchers and space enthusiasts intrigued. After all, it could one day be used as a base station, from where astronauts could travel to planets farther away. But whatever happens, people will have to spend long periods on space craft or space stations - without regular Earth contact. And it's then that we'd be running into supply problems.

 

Identical Twin Astronauts to be Space 'Lab Rats'

 

Irene Klotz - Discovery News

 

Identical twin astronaut brothers, one preparing for a year-long mission aboard the International Space Station and the other a retired four-time shuttle flier, are offering to serve as proverbial lab rats for scientists interested in probing microgravity's impacts on a genetic level. Scott Kelly, who already has made one long-duration flight aboard the station, is slated to blast off in 2015 for what will be NASA's first year-long stint. Combined with two earlier shuttle missions, Scott Kelly already has amassed a total 180 days in space. That's more than three times the cumulative 54 days in orbit logged by his twin, Mark Kelly, who left NASA after commanding the final flight of space shuttle Endeavour in 2011 to tend to his wife, former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in January of that year.

 

Canadian space cameras delayed to make way for Olympic torch visit to space station

 

Peter Rakobowchuk - Canadian Press

 

A trip by the Olympic torch to the International Space Station has forced a Vancouver-based company to delay its plans to install two cameras on the orbiting space lab. Scott Larson, the CEO of UrtheCast Corp., originally planned to send the cameras — one that shoots photos and the other video — to the station on a Russian spacecraft in mid-October. "We've been working on this for the last two and a half years," he said in a recent interview. "The basic agreement we have with the Russian space agency (Roscosmos) is that we provide the cameras and then they provide the launch, installation, power and maintenance." But the launch of the cameras has been delayed until late November to accommodate a visit by the Olympic torch.

 

Minnesotan aboard space station talks about health, fitness

 

Cathy Wurzer - Minnesota Public Radio

 

Vining native Karen Nyberg, one of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, is serving as flight engineer for Expedition 36. She flew to the space station on a Russian-built Soyuz space craft in May. Part of her duties include working as a mechanical engineer and as an expert on environmental and thermal controls. Nyberg talked to MPR's Morning Edition from space about how the time in a gravity-free atmosphere has impacted the health and fitness of her colleagues. She also said she keeps up her earth-bound interests in space.

 

Incredible Technology: How to Build a Space Station Colony

 

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

 

Life in a space colony would be different from life on Earth. Gravity might be a thing of the past, everyone could drink distilled urine, and a whole generation of Earthlings may grow up without ever having set foot on the surface of the planet. At the moment, those ideas are still firmly set in the realm of science fiction, but in the next 1,000 years, new technologies could be developed that would enable humanity to colonize space. While a self-sustaining space station colony might be a long way off, scientists are still working to design and perhaps even build a space station that goes beyond low-Earth orbit.

 

China Is Winning the Space Race

Don't laugh. In less than decade, Beijing will likely be world's most important player in outer space.

 

John Hickman - ForeignPolicy.com

 

On June 11, in the flat and featureless Gobi Desert, China took a giant leap for mankind -- or at least a symbolic step toward space dominance -- when it sent three astronauts into space for 15 days. With the past as a guide, both that launch and the 2010 launch of the Chang'e 2 unmanned lunar orbiter are technologically unimpressive. Shift the focus to the present and they are merely unsettling. But look to the future, and they are unmistakable warning signs that China may surpass the United States and Russia to become the world's preeminent spacefaring power.

 

Back in black

 

Dwayne Day - The Space Review

 

The shuttle program is now over and the orbiters are all in museums. The program was so big, and ran for so long, that it is unclear how anybody could write a comprehensive history of it; any "comprehensive" history would necessarily leave much out. Certainly we won't fully understand the shuttle's legacy until some time has passed. For example, if the American human spaceflight program languishes for a long time from now, historians may have a different view of the shuttle's legacy than they will if commercial firms rapidly take the reins. But time is also necessary because some parts of the shuttle's history remain shrouded in secrecy. There are several key parts of the shuttle's history that remain relatively unknown…

 

Challenges face Bezos as he buys Washington Post

 

Ryan Nakashiima - Associated Press

 

Jeff Bezos turned selling books online into a multibillion-dollar business that has changed retailing forever. Many are now anxious to see if Bezos can do the same for the media industry, after the Amazon.com founder announced he is buying The Washington Post and other newspapers for $250 million. Monday's news of the sale to the 49-year-old pioneer of Internet commerce came as a shock to observers, many of whom thought the Graham family would never sell. It also sparked hope among the ranks of reporters beset by seemingly endless cutbacks. Among his champions are the members of the family selling the paper, including publisher Katharine Weymouth, who promised to stay on as publisher. As some journalists shed tears, others expressed optimism. He said he would follow in the footsteps of longtime publisher Katharine Graham, who died in 2001, in pursuing the truth and following important stories, "no matter the cost."

 

MEANWHILE, 'CURIOSITY' TURNS ONE…

 

How Curiosity Became an Astronaut

 

Megan Garber - The Atlantic

 

The most memorable thing was the tears. They were the result, for the most part, of the tensions of the "Seven Minutes of Terror." And of hope. And of anticipation. And of the knowledge that so many people had invested a significant portion of their lives in this one moment -- and the knowledge, as well, of how easily it could all go wrong. Nothing went wrong. At approximately 1:30 am East Coast time on August 5, 2012, the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, erupted with cheers, high fives, hugs, relief, and, yes, tears. The Curiosity rover, which had taken several years to be built and another year to travel away from Earth, had landed safely on the surface of Mars.

 

NASA's Curiosity rover celebrates 1 year on Mars

 

Alicia Chang - Associated Press

 

Mount Sharp has beckoned Curiosity since the NASA rover made its grand entrance on Mars exactly a year ago, dangling from nylon cables to a safe landing. If microbes ever existed on Mars, the mountain represents the best hope for preserving the chemical ingredients that are fundamental to all living things. After a poky but productive start, Curiosity recently pointed its wheels south, rolling toward the base of Mount Sharp in a journey that will last many months. Expect Curiosity to channel its inner tourist as it drives across the rock-strewn landscape, dodging bumps and taking in the scenery. "We do a lot of off-roading on a lot of little dirt roads," said mission manager Jennifer Trosper.

 

NASA has high hopes Mars rover's winning streak will continue

 

Irene Klotz - Reuters

 

The NASA rover Curiosity survived its daredevil landing on Mars one year ago Tuesday and went on to discover that the planet most like Earth in the solar system could indeed have supported microbial life, the primary goal of the mission. "The stunning thing is that we found it all so quickly," California Institute of Technology geologist and lead project scientist John Grotzinger said on Monday during a ceremony at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, marking the rover's first anniversary on Mars.

 

An Earth Year on Mars

 

Kenneth Chang - New York Times

 

On the first anniversary of its landing, halfway through its primary mission to Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover still has a long way to go. To be exact, 4.4 miles. That is the distance to the foothills of Mount Sharp, an 18,000-foot mountain whose rocks could provide clues to a time on Mars when life could have thrived. Because Curiosity is driving at a careful pace — up to 100 yards a day — the journey will take eight or nine months. For now, science is secondary as Curiosity crawls across a barren, largely uninteresting landscape. "Pretty much pure driving, pedal to the metal," said John P. Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist.

 

NASA scientist calls Curiosity's first year on Mars 'awesome'

 

Amina Khan - Los Angeles Times

 

On the first anniversary of NASA's rover Curiosity's touchdown in Gale Crater, Mars Science Laboratory lead scientist John Grotzinger says the team has a lot to be thankful for — and much more to look forward to. The Caltech geologist spoke with The Times about the risks the team took, the groundbreaking findings early in the mission and what they plan to do when they finally reach their goal: Mt. Sharp, the mountain in the middle of Gale Crater.

 

One year on Mars and still roving: What has Curiosity gleaned so far?

 

Pete Spotts - Christian Science Monitor

 

One year into a 23-month mission, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has assured its place in the history of planetary exploration as the most ambitious and one of the most successful attempts to date to explore the surface of another planet. Even before the rover and its package of 10 science instruments wrapped up their first year of measurements, Curiosity's data allowed the mission's science team to answer the broadest question it had designed the rover to answer: Did Mars ever have an environment hospitable to microbial life? Its testing ground: Gale Crater and the layered foothills of Mt. Sharp, a wind-smoothed mountain whose summit rises 18,000 feet from the crater floor.

 

Mars anniversary: Rock star rover's five coolest finds

 

Lisa Grossman - New Scientist

 

One Earth year ago, the world held its breath as NASA's Curiosity rover plunged through the Martian atmosphere to begin a nail-biting descent to the Red Planet's surface. Since its celebrated touchdown on 6 August 2012 (or 5 August if you were on Pacific Standard Time), the rover has been busy firing its laser and tasting the soil, now it is gearing up for a 5 kilometre climb up a mound called Mount Sharp. Here are our picks of the five coolest things we have learned from Curiosity so far…

 

Year One: Mars Rover Curiosity's Key Discoveries

 

Ian O'Neill - Discovery News

 

On Aug. 5, 2012, at 10:31 p.m. PDT, I was standing in silence (with Discovery News' Irene Klotz and Amy Teitel) in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's press room with dozens of representatives from national and international media. We were all transfixed on one large TV screen that showed views from JPL mission control (a mere stone's throw from the media gathering) and flashed up computer renderings of the descending rover approaching the Martian surface. As soon as the signal was received from Mars that the mission had successfully touched down inside Gale Crater, the TV depicted scenes of pure jubilation and the press room erupted first with cheers, then rapid mouseclicking as all the major news outlets released the good news to the world.

 

NASA's Curiosity Rover Celebrates One Year on Mars

 

Mike Wall - Space.com

 

One year ago today (Aug. 5), NASA's Curiosity rover survived its harrowing and unprecedented Red Planet landing, setting off celebrations around the country. The 1-ton robot has achieved a great deal in its 12 months on Mars, discovering an ancient streambed and gathering enough evidence for mission scientists to declare that the planet could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. And more big finds could be in the offing, as Curiosity is now trekking toward its ultimate science destination: the foothills of a huge and mysterious mountain that preserves, in its many layers, a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions.

 

State of the Mission: Curiosity at Year 1

 

Jeffrey Marlow - Wired News

 

On August 6th, 2012, hundreds of scientists stormed the mission operations center at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, eager to take control of the Curiosity rover. Moments before, the blue-shirted engineering team had stuck the most improbable of landings, and the JPL campus was abuzz with celebrity guests and news crews. Over the coming weeks, members of the science team would jockey for position at overflowing work stations, scurry around hallways from meeting to meeting, and plot the course for the instruments they had worked for decades to bring to the surface of Mars. It was a dynamic – if occasionally slightly chaotic – time at mission control. The buoyant mood was contagious, and hardened scientists would often stop and stare at Curiosity's latest images, awestruck wonder trumping procedural expediency.

 

Curiosity rover celebrates one-year anniv. since 'seven minutes of terror'

 

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.com

 

A year ago today, the world watched and waited for the moment of truth, as many months of planning and preparation finally gave way to the "Seven Minutes of Terror." High above Mars, the incoming Curiosity rover was about to become the United States' fourth successfully operated rover to land and traverse the surface of the Red Planet. However, unlike its predecessors—Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity—the large size and mass of Curiosity meant that an airbag-cushioned touchdown was out of the question. Instead, the 1,980-pound rover depended upon a complex array of parachutes, retrorockets, and a never-before-tried "Sky Crane" to guide it to a pinpoint landing within the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. In an event which proved as much a miracle as a technological triumph, it succeeded, and Curiosity's first year has revolutionized our understanding of Mars … so much so that in December 2012 its mission was reportedly extended indefinitely.

 

One Year of Curiosity - Are We Any Closer to Sending Humans to Mars?

 

Chris Carberry - Huffington Post

 

(Carberry is Executive Director and co-founder, Explore Mars, Inc.)

 

One year ago, the world watched as the Curiosity rover was lowered to the Martian surface in one of the most spectacular engineering feats ever attempted. People assembled for special landing parties all around the globe; hundreds of people gathered after 1:00 a.m. in Times Square in New York to view the coverage of the landing on the jumbotron; and millions more viewed online. Since then, Curiosity has been sending back amazing data - providing solid evidence that Mars was once had suitable conditions to sustain life as well as providing amazing images with unprecedented resolution - and the mission has really only just begun. Curiosity reminded us what we can be and what we can achieve as a nation. No other nation currently has the capacity to match that technological achievement. The public outpouring of excitement and support was clear and reenergized the question - When will we be sending humans to Mars? The public is hungry for a mission like this.

__________

 

COMPLETE STORIES

 

Lori Garver Leaving NASA for Air Line Pilots Association

 

Brian Berger - Space News

 

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver is stepping down Sept. 6 to take the top staff job at the Washington-based Air Line Pilots Association, SpaceNews has confirmed. A formal announcement is expected Tuesday.

 

Garver informed colleagues of her decision in an Aug. 5 email. "After quite an extensive decision process, I have decided to make a career change. I will be resigning from my position as NASA Deputy Administrator, effective September 6 and have accepted a new position in the private sector outside the space industry," Garver wrote. "NASA will be sending out a formal announcement tomorrow with all the details. It has been great working with you all these years and I'm sure that our paths will continue to cross."

 

Garver, who has served as NASA's No. 2 official since July 2009, has spent most of her career working on space policy. She came to Washington in 1983 to work for then-U.S. Sen. John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth. After Glenn's failed 1984 presidential bid, Garver went to work for the National Space Society, rising to executive director, a job she held until joining NASA in 1996 as a policy adviser to then-NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin.

 

After George W. Bush took office in 2001, Garver left NASA for the private sector, advising Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and the Planetary Society, among others, as a vice president at the Washington-based consulting firm DFI International (since renamed Avascent Group).

 

Garver served as the lead civil space adviser to John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign as well as Hillary Clinton's 2008 run. When Barack Obama defeated Clinton in the Democratic primary, Garver switched camps and went on to lead Obama Presidential Transition Agency Review Team for NASA.

 

President Obama nominated Garver and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden as a package in May 2009. A joint confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee followed on July 8.

 

Nine days later, Garver and Bolden were sworn in together in a low-key ceremony at NASA headquarters.

 

Garver is the fourth longest-serving NASA deputy administrator, behind Hugh Dryden, George Low and Alan Lovelace.

 

As deputy, Garver championed various space privatization efforts, including the agency's Commercial Crew program.

 

"It will be years before it is known what Lori did to help hold the ship of NASA together and point it away from the past," longtime space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo commented on NASAWatch.com, which first reported that Garver will be stepping down.

 

NASA Wants New Framework, Partnerships for Asteroid Initiatives

 

Irene Klotz – Space News

 

NASA is casting a wide net to flesh out a multipurpose, politically viable asteroid exploration initiative that serves scientists while simultaneously preparing for an eventual human expedition to Mars.

 

Its latest salvo was a purposely ambiguous solicitation for ideas about how to find all asteroids that threaten humanity and what to do about them.

 

NASA already has been working on the first part of that project. Its Near-Earth Objects (NEO) Observations Program, currently funded at $20.5 million, already has found about 95 percent of the larger asteroids — those with a diameter of 1 kilometer or larger — in orbits that pass near Earth.

 

"If an object of that size were to impact the Earth, it would have global consequences," Lindley Johnson, NASA program executive for the NEO observation program, told a NASA advisory committee on July 29.

 

The agency currently is about halfway the next phase of the program, a 15-year effort to find 90 percent of the asteroids that are as small as 140 meters in diameter. 

 

"One as much as 100 meters in size would have regional effects and could cause a great many casualties," Johnson said.

 

The agency also wants to begin work on a potentially complementary program to robotically rendezvous with a nonthreatening asteroid and then relocate it or a piece of it into a stable high orbit around the Moon. The relocated object would then serve as the destination for one of the planned Orion capsule's early crewed test flights.

 

The Obama administration wants NASA to tackle both aspects of the asteroid initiative and has proposed doubling the agency's $20 million budget for tracking near-Earth objects for the 2014 fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, as well as adding $85 million for the agency to step up work on solar electric propulsion and other technologies needed for the robotic asteroid rendezvous and relocation.

 

NASA leaders met July 30 at agency headquarters in Washington to examine internal studies proposing multiple concepts and alternatives for each phase of the asteroid rendezvous mission.

 

"At this meeting, we engaged in the critically important work of examining initial concepts to meet the goal of asteroid retrieval and exploration," NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot, who chaired the review, said in a statement. "The agency's science, technology and human exploration teams are working together to better understand near Earth asteroids, including ones potentially hazardous to our planet; demonstrate new technologies; and to send humans farther from home than ever before. I was extremely proud of the teams and the progress they have made so far. I look forward to integrating the inputs as we develop the mission concept further."

 

NASA, meanwhile, continues to spend billions on a shuttle-derived, heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, though the purpose and destination for the deep-space transportation system has oscillated, at times precariously, between the Moon, asteroids, various gravitationally stable so-called Lagrange orbits and, ultimately, Mars.

 

Uniting the factions is indeed a grand challenge and the focus of NASA's latest initiative to find all the asteroids that threaten humanity and figure out what to do about them. The agency received 402 responses to its Request for Information, about 90 of which addressed finding asteroids and the rest focused on mitigation strategies.

 

"It's not a prize competition," said NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck. "It's a large-scale effort that requires activities and contributions beyond NASA's scope. We're trying to leverage others to help us solve a hard problem."

 

"We're offering what we call a 'North Star' — a direction-finder for high-impact, multidisciplinary collaborations and also private-public partnerships," Peck told another NASA advisory committee July 30. "We expect to bring in a lot of sources of partnership — interagency, international, academia, nongovernment organizations, philanthropic organizations, individual citizens."

 

"Really, this is not a program," Peck added. "It's meant to be blurry boundaries. We are intentionally introducing ambiguity here so that in fact we can find the best value added from other organizations outside NASA to help us make progress."

 

Among the groups responding to NASA's "Asteroid Grand Challenge" were the nonprofit B612 Foundation, which is planning an asteroid-hunting space telescope called Sentinel, and Planetary Resources, a private company interested in eventually mining asteroids.

 

NASA plans a public meeting in Houston Sept. 30–Oct. 2 to discuss the asteroid proposals.

 

Gardens in space:

How microalgae and flat panel reactors could sustain life

 

Fabian Schmidt - Deutsche Welle

 

If man ever wants to walk on Mars, a lot of food and oxygen will be required on the way. Producing it all while on the journey - in space - now seems like a viable option.

 

It's still sounds like science fiction - but one day, space travelers could be flying to Mars. The moon too keeps plenty of researchers and space enthusiasts intrigued. After all, it could one day be used as a base station, from where astronauts could travel to planets farther away. But whatever happens, people will have to spend long periods on space craft or space stations - without regular Earth contact. And it's then that we'd be running into supply problems.

 

If we ever want to spend months or even years in space - totally independent and self-sufficient - it's not going to be enough for us to ship all the oxygen, food and drink that we'll need from Earth. For a start, we'll have to find a way of getting it up into space, and when you're traveling to space, every kilo counts.

 

Air out of water

 

This is where so-called life-sustaining circulatory systems come into play. Already, on the International Space Station (ISS), researchers have started reconstituting all kinds of things.

 

"Water is extracted from urine, leaving a concentrated residue, which is then shipped back to Earth on the next provisions flight. The water is cleaned up with chemicals and is fed back into the water circulation system," Gerhild Bornemann, a biologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), explains.

 

Water has a particularly important role: it's even used to reconstitute oxygen on the ISS using electrolysis. Electricity is passed through water to split oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is let out into space, while the oxygen provides good breathing air for the cabin.

 

But the ISS has it easy: it's relatively close to Earth. Several times a year it receives fresh provisions of food and water. But if people start traveling farther away from Earth, they'll have to survive without the luxury of regular, fresh supplies.

 

And that's why Jens Brettschneider at the Institute for Space Systems in Stuttgart is looking for new solutions. His team thinks the answer lies in biological systems, like micro-algae: "They make it possible to collect exhaled CO2 and create new oxygen, and at the same time build up biomass stocks."

 

Food, energy and air - all made from algae

 

Brettschneider is working with a see-through plexiglass tank through which green water runs which bubbles away as exhaled air passes through it. "This tank is a flat panel reactor, with which we can cultivate algae on Earth in an efficient way," Brettschneider says. "The advantage is that the gas is mixing with the algae constantly. That gives us a large contact area. We agitate the algae so that they move towards the light, and then move away from the light again - and that encourages them to grow faster."

 

There are other types of algae that produce hydrogen instead of oxygen. These algae are anaerobic - which means they live in a reactor without oxygen. If one combines reactors with both types of algae, one can produce both oxygen and hydrogen. And, using fuel cells, one can create energy - with the production of water as a side effect.

 

"So you get this great circulatory system going, involving energy, food, oxygen and CO2. It's enabling us to close a few gaps in the life support system," Brettschneider says, pointing out the nutritious benefits of the reactor-made algae: "You can make it into a really nice paste, using a microwave or a ball mill, and mix it into your food. We can cover about 20 percent of an astronaut's daily nutritional requirements with micro-algae."

 

Fresh veggies from space

 

But imagine eating nothing but algae-paste - astronauts wouldn't stand for it! They want tasty foods too - and biologist Gerhild Bornemann has the answer: Tomatoes and other vegetables can grow in glass tubes which have water piped through them - similar to large glasshouses on Earth.

 

The glass tubes are filled with lava into which the plants' roots grow and take hold. The lava then acts as a growth substrate - and it helps with composting, according to Bornemann. "The lava acts as a carrier for the micro-organisms that allow the metabolic processes to function … so basically, we're trying to combine the processing of organic waste with the production of the food."

 

And this is where an astronaut's urine can be useful. "We dilute the urine - the urea in it contains nitrogen, which is needed in fertilizer for plants," Bornemann explains, "bacteria then convert the urea into nitrate - a typical fertilizer."

 

The system can easily compost other solids, too - such as leaves and stems. "In a system like this, with water, the bits are first shredded, and then passed over a filter. They're then metabolized, just like in a compost-heap, but without soil, and it's quicker, too, because there's a constant flow."

 

It would be even quicker if people could take fish into space - because fish can keep the system going. "Using fish makes it faster, because they eat the bits in the system, so it's pre-processed," Bornemann explains.

 

It wouldn't be the first time that fish had been to space - they've been out there for research purposes before, but never as part of a vegetable garden. In any case, the system also works well here on Earth, for example at the DLR offices: "We've had the units set up here in our offices, and we've tried the system with an old bread roll, and it works… and that way we grow these little red tomatoes!"

 

Identical Twin Astronauts to be Space 'Lab Rats'

 

Irene Klotz - Discovery News

 

Identical twin astronaut brothers, one preparing for a year-long mission aboard the International Space Station and the other a retired four-time shuttle flier, are offering to serve as proverbial lab rats for scientists interested in probing microgravity's impacts on a genetic level.

 

Scott Kelly, who already has made one long-duration flight aboard the station, is slated to blast off in 2015 for what will be NASA's first year-long stint. Combined with two earlier shuttle missions, Scott Kelly already has amassed a total 180 days in space.

 

That's more than three times the cumulative 54 days in orbit logged by his twin, Mark Kelly, who left NASA after commanding the final flight of space shuttle Endeavour in 2011 to tend to his wife, former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in January of that year.

 

With Scott Kelly on tap to add another 365 days to his space calendar, researchers got the idea that the brothers' identical genetics might provide a unique opportunity to learn more about how microgravity impacts the human body on a level not previously studied.

 

"A study like this is going to be mostly observational, just see what we can find out. It's not the kind of research that we in the human research program normally like to do," chief scientist John Charles, with NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, told Discovery News.

 

"We like to do the things that are goal-oriented and have a specific outcome expected so we can use the information to advise engineers how to design better rocket ships and so forth," Charles said.

 

Initially, Scott Kelly raised the topic as he prepared for media interviews after being named the U.S. crewmember for NASA's first year-long spaceflight. Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will be flying with Kelly, though he will become the fifth Russian to spend a year or longer in space.

 

"I was sitting in a room with a few other folks, sort of going through some questions (Scott) might get and giving him some idea of what answers he might offer," Charles said.

 

"Scott asked 'what if somebody asks me about the twins thing?' and I said 'I can't imagine how that might would be of any real usefulness, so let's not worry about. It's a non-issue," Charles said.

 

Later when Charles said he laughingly told his colleagues about the idea, they took it seriously.

 

"They said, 'Well, wait a second, there might be something to that.' So I got to eat crow, and tell Scott, 'We've thought about it and actually it's a bad idea, if we understand what the limitations really are,' " Charles said.

 

Researchers do not know what they may learn.

 

"This is sort of our first foray into the genetic aspects of spaceflight. This really is the wave of the future, and it's not all that new, but it is new to my way of thinking," said Charles, a physiologist.

 

"The opportunity was suggested by the fact that we have twins, but the opportunity will not be limited to the twins," he added.

 

"Since we are all humans and we all have certain genes in common, there may well be insights that can be gained that have not been investigated yet," Charles said.

 

The idea behind using identical twins as subjects is that researchers will have one brother flying and the other on the ground for comparative studies on genetic changes that may be impacted by microgravity. The Kelly brothers turn 50 on Feb. 21, about a month before Scott Kelly is slated to launch.

 

"The way we wrote the proposal is essentially anything that researchers think is relevant to understanding the genomics and proteomics and metabolomics and other 'omics' that can be deduced from a study of one astronaut in flight and one astronaut who is retired and not flying and living the good life in Albuquerque," Charles said.

 

"Mark said he'd come to town several times a year (for studies) and I imagine that will be co-incident with the times that we make measurements on Scott in flight," Charles said.

 

"I'm hopeful that most of this can be done with blood that will be drawn or with things like questionnaires and surveys. That would be the easiest to implement, but we are prepared for any kind of suggestions that the scientific community present that do pass peer-review and do promise to illuminate the differences in homozygous twins in response to spaceflight," Charles said.

 

Proposals are due Sept. 17.

 

Canadian space cameras delayed to make way for Olympic torch visit to space station

 

Peter Rakobowchuk - Canadian Press

 

A trip by the Olympic torch to the International Space Station has forced a Vancouver-based company to delay its plans to install two cameras on the orbiting space lab.

 

Scott Larson, the CEO of UrtheCast Corp., originally planned to send the cameras — one that shoots photos and the other video — to the station on a Russian spacecraft in mid-October.

 

"We've been working on this for the last two and a half years," he said in a recent interview.

 

"The basic agreement we have with the Russian space agency (Roscosmos) is that we provide the cameras and then they provide the launch, installation, power and maintenance."

 

But the launch of the cameras has been delayed until late November to accommodate a visit by the Olympic torch.

 

The first-of-its-kind space voyage by the Olympic icon has also caused a number of other launches to be rescheduled.

 

As part of the four-month relay, the torch — with a simulated flame — will be taken into outer space in early November during a space walk by two Russian cosmonauts.

 

Originally, a manned Soyuz capsule was meant to go the space station on Nov. 25 but that flight was moved to Nov. 7 to accommodate the torch.

 

Serguei Bedziouk, UrtheCast's vice-president in charge of Russian relations, said the torch will be taken outside on Nov. 9, two days after the Soyuz arrives.

 

In an email from St. Petersburg, he also added that the torch will return to Earth on Nov. 11 with another group of returning space station astronauts.

 

Bedziouk was involved in the Russian space program from 1977 to 1989 and moved to Canada in 1996.

 

The torch relay will begin in Moscow on Oct. 7, pass through 83 Russian cities and arrive in Sochi for the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics next Feb. 7. It will also travel by car, train, plane and reindeer.

 

The two UrtheCast cameras will now be delivered to the space station on an unmanned Russian supply vessel that will launch from Kazakhstan on Nov. 21.

 

Bedziouk said the cameras will be installed on the space station during a space walk planned for Dec. 8.

 

Cosmonauts recently practised installing mock-ups of the UrtheCast cameras at an underwater replica of the Russian segment of the space station in Star City near Moscow.

 

Larson added that, once installed, the cameras will go through a few weeks of testing and focusing and he expects to have pictures and images flowing "in the first quarter of the next year."

 

He said the Russians will collect images related to their own country, while UrtheCast will handle the data pertaining to the rest of the world.

 

The high-resolution video imagery will be used for education, environmental study, water management, mapping, forestry and pipeline monitoring.

 

"We sell it and we distribute it into the Earth observation market," Larson said "The second thing we do is we take it, process it and stream it in as near real-time as we can.

 

There will be about a one-hour delay before the images taken by the space station cameras show up on UrtheCast's website.

 

The cameras will be able to show flash mobs, outdoor events, stadiums, boats and planes, but images like people's faces and licence plates will be too small to be visible.

 

Larson said the space cameras cost about $25 million combined — a sum he said is a fraction of what it costs to attach cameras to satellites, which require large solar panels to generate electricity.

 

"Other competitors spend in the neighbourhood of $500-$800 million building satellites," he added.

 

UrtheCast went public June 27 through a reverse takeover of Longford Energy Inc., a $30-million shell company that was originally set up as a resource business.

 

UrtheCast says on its website it was one of four Canadian high-tech companies — two of the others being in Ontario and the other in Saskatchewan — to go public on the TSX in recent weeks.

 

Minnesotan aboard space station talks about health, fitness

 

Cathy Wurzer - Minnesota Public Radio

 

Vining native Karen Nyberg, one of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, is serving as flight engineer for Expedition 36. She flew to the space station on a Russian-built Soyuz space craft in May.

 

Part of her duties include working as a mechanical engineer and as an expert on environmental and thermal controls.

 

Nyberg talked to MPR's Morning Edition from space about how the time in a gravity-free atmosphere has impacted the health and fitness of her colleagues. She also said she keeps up her earth-bound interests in space.

 

Nyberg said that unlike other spacecraft, the space station is comparatively roomy.

 

"The International Space Station is quite large. We have a number of modules. We have the Russian segment and the United States segment. And we have, you know, 10 modules or so on the U.S. segment that are quite large, the size of a school bus or bigger. So it's very easy," she said. "We each have our own sleeping quarters, if you feel like you do need to get away from each other. And when we're working throughout the day, sometimes we're working in the same module, sometimes we're separated. So really the privacy is good and interpersonally, I think this is a great place to be."

 

The crew includes two Russians, a Georgian, two Americans and an Italian. The mission includes US experiments involving satellite power technology, an Italian experiment on biofuels and a NASA study of the effects of long-term space flight on the eyes of astronauts.

 

Nyberg says the days go by quickly and there's a lot of work to do.

 

"You really realize that there's not a lot of free time, especially on weekdays. And by the time we finish our workday and get done with our daily planning conference that we do with all the space centers around the world, then its time for dinner, and phone calls to family and that type of thing and then the day is done," Nyberg said. "On the weekends, we have about half the day on Saturday where we have free time and them most of Sunday. We all like to go and take pictures out of the window. We read, we sit and chat with each other. I bought some projects to work on. I'm trying to do a little bit of sewing. I haven't done as much as I would like, but like I said, the free time, the time just goes so fast here."

 

But she did manage to snap a picture of her hometown of Vining from space recently. The town is between Fergus Falls and Brainerd in northwestern Minnesota. (View the photo by clicking here.)

 

"I had been waiting to get a picture of it," Nyberg said. "And every single time we passed over it was very cloudy. And then one time I was working on a project, and (Chris Cassidy) called over intercom and said 'Karen, its clear in Minnesota.' And so I went down to the cupola and got some pictures and I think everybody in my hometown area really enjoyed it."

 

The current crew from the ISS is expected to return to earth in September.

 

Incredible Technology: How to Build a Space Station Colony

 

Miriam Kramer - Space.com

 

Life in a space colony would be different from life on Earth.

 

Gravity might be a thing of the past, everyone could drink distilled urine, and a whole generation of Earthlings may grow up without ever having set foot on the surface of the planet. At the moment, those ideas are still firmly set in the realm of science fiction, but in the next 1,000 years, new technologies could be developed that would enable humanity to colonize space.

 

While a self-sustaining space station colony might be a long way off, scientists are still working to design and perhaps even build a space station that goes beyond low-Earth orbit.

 

"It extends the capability of humans to be out in space away from Earth," Paul Bookout, project manager of the concept demonstrator for Deep Space Habitat at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said of building a space station in deep space. "For example if you could go to a near-Earth asteroid and you had a habitat out there, you could stay extended periods of time … and do research on the asteroid, bring samples back in, continuing work out there instead of trying to bring small samples back to Earth."

 

"Elysium" — a new science fiction film about a world in which only the rich and powerful can live in a seemingly utopic space station orbiting Earth — is the newest in a long line of movies dealing with the science of space living.

 

"The premise is totally believable to me," Mark Uhran, a former assistant associate administrator for the International Space Station at NASA Headquarters, said of the movie. "When I took a look at the Elysium station, I thought to myself, that's certainly achievable within this millennium."

 

How to build a station

 

Engineers and researchers need to overcome a few major obstacles before a sustainable space station colony is a viable possibility, Uhran said.

 

"It's clear that the number-one challenge is chemical propulsion," Uhran told SPACE.com. "We learned an incredible amount with [the International Space Station] and we demonstrated that we have the technology to assemble large structures in space. What we need are rockets that can get material out of the Earth's gravity well and deliver it to whatever location the future space station is assembled."

 

The supplies needed to create the space station don't necessarily have to come from Earth, Uhran said. Asteroids and other planetary bodies like the moon could provide elements needed to build the station. However, moving the heavy supplies to their proper place in orbit from any cosmic hub would still be a challenge for current propulsion systems.

 

Nuclear propulsion — rockets powered by nuclear reactions — could be a more efficient way of taking supplies to the station, but that kind of technology isn't advanced enough to use currently. It's possible that scientists will find a way to create a better propulsion system sometime in this millennium or the next one, Uhran said.

 

Engineers will also need to create a closed-loop life-support system that can recycle most of the materials used in the colony to make the space station sustainable indefinitely. Currently, the International Space Station operates at about a 70 to 80 percent closed loop system for water.

 

"In the habitats that we're designing [at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.] at the moment, we're using the [International Space Station]-based systems, but there is research ongoing on making the systems more and more closed-loop so that you can minimize the amount of air and water supplies you have to carry up to support the crew," said David Smitherman, study lead for research into deep space habitats and designs at Marshall. "There are some advanced ecosystems development work that's ongoing that's trying to do an even better job than what we have on the space station."

 

Radiation is also a major concern for astronauts living onboard a space station. Crewmembers on the International Space Station today are blasted with about 40 times more potentially dangerous space radiation during a six-month stint on the orbiting outpost than the average person gets in a year on the ground. Those numbers would only get worse the deeper an astronaut travels into space. 

 

Comfort in a space station

 

One deep-space travel issue that scientists probably wouldn't need to worry about is isolation, experts say. By building a colony that could support more than just a small crew, astronauts will probably have enough social activity to prevent isolation-related issues in space.

 

That doesn't mean that the space station shouldn't at least be somewhat comfortable. Scientists working with NASA's Deep Space Habitat program are developing ways to create a comfortable living space for astronauts aboard a space station in deep space.

 

"On one end, you have crew quarters and then it has a little hallway that opens up into a larger living area," Bookout told SPACE.com. "We're trying to change up the versatility; instead of living in a box, it's something like your house."

 

One station design the scientists at Marshall are looking into is somewhat like Skylab, the first American space station that was inhabited for 171 days between 1973 and 1974. The station could be ideal for deep space living because it provides a somewhat comfortable living situation through design.

 

A deep space station could be built using NASA's Space Launch System — a heavy launch rocket in development that could deliver astronauts to deep-space destinations including Mars. The station would be made from a tank used on the rocket that would be about the size of a two-story house, much larger than the rooms in the International Space Station.

 

"[One] configuration that we've looked at is a 500-day configuration that would go to a near-Earth asteroid or Mars," Bookout said. "It consisted of a space station lab-size module and they would have a multipurpose logistics module and that would make up your core elements for the mission."

 

Design a station, win a prize

 

People from all walks of life can get involved in NASA's mission to create a sustainable deep space habitat, planners say.

 

The space agency sponsors the eXploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge for university students. The X-Hab competition asks students for ideas about the best ways to craft a space station that could exist for an indefinite amount of time in deep space.

 

"One of the nice things about the X-Hab project is that we have been able to fund student work on a variety of habitat designs, which stimulates us and gives us ideas about ways to lay them out and innovative things to incorporate," Smitherman said.

 

China Is Winning the Space Race

Don't laugh. In less than decade, Beijing will likely be world's most important player in outer space.

 

John Hickman - ForeignPolicy.com

 

On June 11, in the flat and featureless Gobi Desert, China took a giant leap for mankind -- or at least a symbolic step toward space dominance -- when it sent three astronauts into space for 15 days. With the past as a guide, both that launch and the 2010 launch of the Chang'e 2 unmanned lunar orbiter are technologically unimpressive. Shift the focus to the present and they are merely unsettling. But look to the future, and they are unmistakable warning signs that China may surpass the United States and Russia to become the world's preeminent spacefaring power.

 

Yes, launching a three-seat space capsule and docking it with a temporary space station is straight out of the bell-bottom jeans and wide-collar era: it merely replicates what Americans achieved in 1973 with their Skylab 2 mission. With only one main chamber, the diminutive Tiangong 1 space station is far less impressive and barely one-tenth the size of Skylab, not to mention the even larger, elaborately segmented structure of modules, docking ports, and solar arrays that make up the International Space Station (ISS), the largest artificial object in Earth orbit.

 

Why worry that the Chinese are exploiting 40-year-old technology to send a few men and women into space? Won't it take them decades to catch up? Won't they be daunted by the same engineering and medical scientific barriers that have stalled their predecessors in low Earth orbit, like damage to spacecraft from micrometeorite impacts, and damage to human bodies from exposure to cosmic radiation and weightlessness? And isn't the space race dead anyway?

 

Not necessarily. The Chinese have not only matched many of the achievements of the Americans and Russians in space -- and in far less time than it took their predecessors to reach the same milestones -- they did so while avoiding their biggest mistakes. For example, rather than investing in customized, expensive space shuttles like both Washington and Moscow banked on, the Chinese are using reliable, mass-producible spacecraft, like the Soyuz capsule. 

 

And the Chinese space program enjoys some important advantages over its U.S. rival.  As the recent surge in missions attests, the Chinese space program likely enjoys generous and stable government funding -- though the exact amount is unknown. (Meanwhile, NASA's budget as a percent of the federal budget has fallen from 4.41 percent in 1966 to 0.48 percent in 2012.) And the Chinese space program has the support of a unified Chinese leadership: China's President Xi Jinping won't be shutting down the Shenzhou missions to diminish the legacy of his predecessors, as President Richard Nixon did by ending manned lunar exploration.

 

The United States may have given up on the space dream, but it still burns brightly in the Chinese psyche. Among the most important -- if unquantifiable -- resources Beijing possesses is an extraordinary sense of historical grievance. Chinese nationalists are conscious of almost two centuries of national humiliation at the hands of other great powers, attributable to Chinese military technological backwardness. Anxiety about technology transfers prompted the Pentagon to reject Chinese participation in the ISS, a decision that has drawn little objection from the other 14 participating countries -- and of which some Chinese nationalists are keenly aware. The United States and its allies are even encircling China in orbital space, or so the thinking goes.

 

Shenzhou 10, however, represents more than a pricey technological ornament for nationalists with a chip on their shoulders. China now has what the United States lacks: a reliable manned spacecraft. The United States finds itself in the preposterous situation of depending on Russia to transport personnel and much of the cargo to and from the ISS. Underfunding and poor planning means that the same nation that once landed men on the Moon can no longer launch anyone into orbit. The United States' best hope is that the private firm SpaceX, which NASA has contracted to supply cargo to the ISS, will eventually be able to transport U.S. astronauts as well. Shenzhou 10 is a reminder that for at least the next few years, space is only accessible via a Russian or Chinese rocket. No wonder that astronauts from the European Space Agency are learning Chinese. 

 

If Beijing is intent on besting the West, a manned landing on Mars -- extremely risky but possible with today's technology -- could help secure China's place as the foremost spacefaring power. Establishing a permanent manned Moon base, however, would be a more attractive goal -- and one that allows China to minimize the scientific and medical barriers present in low-Earth orbit. The spectacle of second-tier spacefaring states lining up to request permission to station personnel or supply components for the base would be an enormous boost to China's status. And it's not all that ridiculously far-fetched: a permanent Moon base would probably only cost something comparable to that of the ISS --approximately $5 billion a year. Granted, the Moon is farther away than the Earth's orbit, but most of the fuel used in transporting people and materials to space is for freeing them from the Earth's gravity. Additionally, the Moon possesses ice, which can be turned in water and oxygen -- resources which have to be hauled up from Earth for a space station. In any case, excluding Americans from this moon base would be revenge served very, very cold. 

 

But there is much more to be gained from a Moon base than satisfying honor. Remember that manned space missions are an escape from a perceived geopolitical encirclement, comparable to that felt by German political and military elites in the late 19th century. Berlin's solution was to build a blue-water navy and colonize parts of Africa. Establishing a Moon base would not only represent an escape from perceived terrestrial encirclement, but also be the effective occupation necessary to assert territorial sovereignty in international law. Granted, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty expressly prohibits extraterrestrial annexations. However, if China emerges as the leading spacefaring power, it will have the opportunity and motive to rewrite the international legal regime for space. In its territorial disputes back on Earth, Beijing insists on its own interpretation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. What would prevent it from being even more assertive if it becomes the only spacefaring power with boots on the regolith?

 

The next big milestone is China's plan to establish its own space station by 2020 -- which happens to be the same year that the International Space Station is scheduled to be scrapped and sunk into the ocean. In the long run, Shenzhou 10 may determine the terms under which the spacefaring powers compete on the final frontier. One of many ancient names for China is Tianchao -- the Celestial Empire. Shenzhou 10 may be pointing the way toward its creation.

 

Back in black

 

Dwayne Day - The Space Review

 

The shuttle program is now over and the orbiters are all in museums. The program was so big, and ran for so long, that it is unclear how anybody could write a comprehensive history of it; any "comprehensive" history would necessarily leave much out. Certainly we won't fully understand the shuttle's legacy until some time has passed. For example, if the American human spaceflight program languishes for a long time from now, historians may have a different view of the shuttle's legacy than they will if commercial firms rapidly take the reins. But time is also necessary because some parts of the shuttle's history remain shrouded in secrecy. There are several key parts of the shuttle's history that remain relatively unknown:

 

·         The precise role that intelligence requirements played in determining the orbiter's original design.

·         The decisions and changes required in the intelligence community to adapt their payloads to fly on the shuttle.

·         The classified intelligence payloads that were launched from the shuttle on ten separate flights.

 

The broad outlines of many of these subjects are known, but the details are not. For instance, we know that cross-range requirements drove the orbiter's designers to include a large wing, and we know that certain intelligence payload sizes drove the payload bay size. But as yet we do not have the details, including who, what, and when, for decisions made over forty years ago.

 

Gradually, however, some of the information on these first two points is being declassified. Certainly not a lot, not yet, and it will be many years—probably even decades—before we get a mostly complete account of those subjects. But some light is creeping in.

 

Take, for example, a recently declassified March 1981 document on "National Reconnaissance Program Utilization of the Shuttle." The document, previously classified "Top Secret," does not indicate who wrote it, but it was clearly intended to serve as an overview of where the National Reconnaissance Office's various satellite programs stood just before the first flight of the shuttle. Columbia launched on April 12, 1981.

 

According to the document, the NRO had been transitioning reconnaissance satellites to the shuttle for several years while planning to maintain a backup expendable launch vehicle capability. But the shuttle program had slipped, the NRO had to change its own schedules, and evaluate its plan to phase out all expendable launch vehicles by 1985.

 

Attached to the document was the NRO's utilization plan for the shuttle, which contains numerous deletions pertaining to the intelligence satellites then under construction that were planned to fly aboard the shuttle. The utilization plan for the first time provides a clear declaration of the NRO's policy toward use of the shuttle before 1978: "The NRO will not commit any reconnaissance satellite program to final design and manufacturing which is dependent on a Space Shuttle capability until said capability has been demonstrated on orbit."

 

According to the utilization plan, this meant that although the shuttle was planned to enter service in 1978–79, the NRO's satellites would not start flying on the shuttle until 1984–85, "and even then, in many cases, would not be fully optimized to take advantage of the unique Shuttle capabilities."

 

The NRO's plan was not popular either with Congress or with the Carter Administration. As a result, the policy was revised in mid-1978, and some payloads—their identities are deleted—were then optimized to fly on the shuttle. At the time the shuttle was planned to be operational in August 1980, providing several years of margin before the satellites would fly. Other satellites, like the GAMBIT and HEXAGON reconnaissance satellites, which were declassified in late 2011, were scheduled for retirement rather than eventual launch on the shuttle.

 

Unfortunately for the NRO, the shuttle's operational date slipped by over two years, and Congress and the administration agreed to accelerate the launch of these payloads. The NRO was getting squeezed between a rock and a hard place and their schedule margin got a lot smaller. By the time of the first shuttle launch, all reconnaissance satellite programs would be dependent on the shuttle by the end of 1985, when the last expendable launch vehicles were phased out. This made NRO officials nervous, and the utilization plan acknowledged that, by this time, there had been a lot of discussion about whether it was wise to shift all of the NRO's payloads to the shuttle or retain a backup expendable launch vehicle capability. Presumably, the transition to a new presidential administration and new leadership in the Department of Defense and elsewhere had also given shuttle opponents hope that the earlier decisions might be reversed. It is an old adage in Washington that if you don't like a policy, you wait for a new administration.

 

The first classified payload launched on the shuttle was a satellite reportedly originally designated "MAGNUM" and renamed "ORION" by the time that it was launched aboard Discovery on the STS-51C mission in January 1985. ORION was reportedly a geosynchronous signals intelligence satellite. A second one was launched in 1989.

 

The shuttle utilization plan also stated, "Other uses of the Shuttle planned by the NRO includes checkout on orbit, development of satellite structures packaging to take full advantage of Shuttle payload bay volume, and use of astronaut extravehicular activity to assist in satellite deployment."

 

The general outlines of this story have been known for a while now. The fact that the NRO leadership was reluctant during the 1970s to switch its payloads to the shuttle and had to be forced was revealed by former NRO Director Hans Mark in his 1987 book (see "The spooks and the turkey", The Space Review, November 20, 2006.) But these documents are the first official confirmation of the NRO's pre- and post-1978 policies towards using the shuttle. They are also the first confirmation that the first two scheduled NRO payloads had been specifically designed for shuttle launch.

 

We still have a long way to go to understanding these critical aspects of shuttle history, but perhaps we can finally take some of the first steps.

 

Challenges face Bezos as he buys Washington Post

 

Ryan Nakashiima - Associated Press

 

Jeff Bezos turned selling books online into a multibillion-dollar business that has changed retailing forever. Many are now anxious to see if Bezos can do the same for the media industry, after the Amazon.com founder announced he is buying The Washington Post and other newspapers for $250 million.

 

Monday's news of the sale to the 49-year-old pioneer of Internet commerce came as a shock to observers, many of whom thought the Graham family would never sell. It also sparked hope among the ranks of reporters beset by seemingly endless cutbacks.

 

Among his champions are the members of the family selling the paper, including publisher Katharine Weymouth, who promised to stay on as publisher.

 

As some journalists shed tears, others expressed optimism.

 

"Jeff Bezos seems to me exactly the kind of inventive and innovative choice needed to bring about a recommitment to great journalism," said Carl Bernstein, whose co-reporting of the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s cemented the newspaper's identity as a political watchdog.

 

But The Post, like most newspapers, has been losing readers and advertisers to the Internet while watching its value plummet. The paper has cut its newsroom staff repeatedly in recent years and closed several bureaus.

 

Many see Bezos, whose fortune was valued at $25 billion by Forbes magazine, as being rich enough to sustain the losses the newspaper will likely face over the next few years.

 

Bezos is buying the newspaper as an individual. Amazon.com Inc. is not involved.

 

Bezos said to Post employees in a letter distributed to the media that he'd be keeping his "day job" as Amazon CEO and a life in "the other Washington" where Amazon's headquarters are based in Seattle.

 

But he made clear there would be changes, if unforeseen ones, coming.

 

"The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs," Bezos wrote. "There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment."

 

Washington Post Co. chairman and CEO Donald Graham called Bezos a "uniquely good new owner." He said the decision was made after years of newspaper industry challenges. The company, which will continue to own the Kaplan college and test preparation business along with six TV stations, will change its name but didn't say what it will be.

 

Bezos said in a statement that he understands the Post's "critical role" in Washington and said its values won't change.

 

"The paper's duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners," Bezos said in his letter to Post employees.

 

He said he would follow in the footsteps of longtime publisher Katharine Graham, who died in 2001, in pursuing the truth and following important stories, "no matter the cost."

 

"While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a wringer, if they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham's example, I'll be ready," he wrote.

 

Weymouth, the newspaper's publisher and CEO and a member of the Graham family that has owned the newspaper since 1933, will remain in her post. She has asked other senior managers to stay on as well.

 

"Mr. Bezos knows as well as anyone the opportunities that come with revolutionary technology when we understand how to make the most of it," she said in a letter to readers. "Under his ownership and with his management savvy, we will be able to accelerate the pace and quality of innovation."

 

The news surprised industry observers and even the newspaper's employees.

 

"I think we're all still in shock," said Robert McCartney, one of the newspaper's Metro columnists and a 31-year veteran. "Everybody's standing around the newsroom talking about it. ... I don't think much work's getting done."

 

An email hit staffers' inboxes at 4:17 p.m. EDT. It summoned them to a meeting 13 minutes later.

 

Graham spoke at the staff meeting of how he has known Bezos for more than a decade, and described him as a decent and patient man, said McCartney.

 

Graham told the staff he is convinced Bezos is committed to quality journalism and has no political agenda. There was a long standing ovation from the staff after Graham and Weymouth's remarks.

 

"Hard to imagine the Post without the Grahams," wrote East Asia Correspondent Chico Harlan in a tweet. "Don emailed his writers, knew their names."

 

Writer Gene Weingarten tweeted, "If Don Graham says this was the right thing to do, I trust him."

 

Fredrick Kunkle, a metro reporter and a union leader at The Post, said there is also apprehension among staff.

 

"The Graham family has been revered in this town, rightly so," he said, adding he saw at least one person at the meeting wipe away tears. "We all have a lot of questions."

 

Allen & Co., an investment banking firm which held a high-level conference for media and technology executives in Sun Valley, Idaho, last month, was named as an adviser to the deal. Bezos and Graham have been known to frequent the conference.

 

To observers, the Amazon chief is eminently qualified to be a newspaper owner: He's rich, he's innovative and he's willing to live with slim profits. That's proven by his running of Amazon since its foundation. Last month, Amazon.com reported an unexpected loss in the April-June quarter even though revenue grew 22 percent to $15.7 billion.

 

"Some other buyers might see the Post as a thing to drain money out of," said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. "There's little reason to think (Bezos would) fall into that category."

 

Rick Edmonds, a media and business analyst at The Poynter Institute, a journalism school, compared Bezos' purchase of the Post to billionaire John Henry's $70 million purchase of The Boston Globe, which was announced Saturday.

 

The newspaper transactions remove established publications from publicly traded parent companies that had to answer to shareholders who demanded good quarterly financial results.

 

"This means putting the Post in the hands of a wealthy individual who can take as long as he needs and spend as much money as he wishes in keeping the paper strong," Edmonds said. "That's a much better situation than a company with other faster-growing businesses trying to justify that same investment."

 

Alan Mutter, a media consultant and former newspaper editor, said this deal marks the first time a newspaper has been bought by a "digital native," not someone entrenched in the print medium.

 

"Here's a guy who's going to re-envision the newspaper from top to bottom and we'll see what we get," Mutter said.

 

Besides The Washington Post and its website, Bezos is taking the Express newspaper, The Gazette Newspapers, Southern Maryland Newspapers, Fairfax County Times, El Tiempo Latino and Greater Washington Publishing.

 

The soon-to-be-renamed Washington Post Co. will retain Slate magazine, TheRoot.com and Foreign Policy magazine, as well as the Post's headquarters building in downtown Washington.

 

Newspaper revenue has shriveled during the past eight years even as many publishers charged readers more for their print editions and began imposing fees for digital access, too.

 

The Post Co.'s annual newspaper revenue has plunged 39 percent from $957 million in 2005 to $582 million last year. Meanwhile, the company's newspaper division has swung from an annual operating profit of $125 million to an operating loss of $54 million last year.

 

Readership of the print editions has also plummeted during the past decade. In 2002, The Washington Post's paid weekday circulation averaged nearly 768,000 copies, according to regulatory filings. By last year, the Post's weekday paid circulation had fallen to an average of just under 481,000, a 37 percent drop.

 

The hard times are reflected in the Post Co.'s stock price, which hit a high of $999.50 near the end of 2004. The shares closed Monday at $568.70, a 43 percent decline from the peak.

 

Newspaper analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell Inc. said the Grahams likely realized that the family lacked the financial wherewithal to endure the turbulence still facing the industry.

 

"As they look out beyond 2013, it's clear print advertising is going to continue to decline and it's causing pressures they didn't expect," Doctor said.

 

In contrast, sustaining annual losses of about $10 million for a few more years is more tolerable to Bezos and other billionaires such as Warren Buffett, who has also been buying newspapers in the past few years, Doctor said.

 

Benchmark Co. analyst Ed Atorino said the sales of the Boston Globe and Washington Post demonstrate that some savvy business leaders still see hope for newspapers.

 

"Apparently there are people in this country who think these newspapers are worth saving and hope that advertising will eventually stabilize and they can begin to make money again," Atorino said. "If the advertising doesn't come back, then game over."

 

MEANWHILE, 'CURIOSITY' TURNS ONE…

 

How Curiosity Became an Astronaut

From the earliest years of the space program, the exploration of other worlds has been a source of the same techno-anxieties we have today

 

Megan Garber - The Atlantic

 

The most memorable thing was the tears. They were the result, for the most part, of the tensions of the "Seven Minutes of Terror." And of hope. And of anticipation. And of the knowledge that so many people had invested a significant portion of their lives in this one moment -- and the knowledge, as well, of how easily it could all go wrong.

 

Nothing went wrong. At approximately 1:30 am East Coast time on August 5, 2012, the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, erupted with cheers, high fives, hugs, relief, and, yes, tears. The Curiosity rover, which had taken several years to be built and another year to travel away from Earth, had landed safely on the surface of Mars.

 

And it's a good thing it did: had something gone wrong, there would have been a good chunk of humanity on hand to witness the failure. Members of the public had gathered together at watch parties -- including an enormous one on the streets of New York's Times Square -- to observe the landing as it happened. Millions more were watching the landing at home, through NASA's live stream. NASA had chosen, at considerable risk, to make Curiosity's landing on Mars an event, a spectacle, a drama that unfolded in nearly real time: one small step for a robot, one giant leap for robotkind.

 

Since then, in large part as a result of that initial spectacle, Curiosity has enjoyed a level of celebrity rarely accorded to mere machines. Even its most mundane activities -- scooping dirt, taking a break, finding a rock -- are newsworthy. More than a million people follow the rover's Twitter feed. A replica of Curiosity marched -- well, "marched" -- in President Obama's second inaugural parade.

 

That we would care so much about a robot on a distant planet seems oddly logical and entirely fitting in an age that has seen the retirement of the space shuttle program and the beginning of space as an everyday reality show. With the International Space Station serving as the only outlet for the world's remaining astronauts, space explorers have undergone a fairly abrupt transition from "explorers" to "homemakers." We Earthbound creatures crave new stories about the next frontier. But since humans haven't gone beyond low-earth orbit for decades, we're left with machines. Curiosity, the cheeky little rover that could, is filling the void.

 

In that, however, Curiosity represents a significant shift in our sense of what space travel is and can be. Say "space travel," after all, and most of us -- still -- think of the Apollo missions, of Neil and Buzz and those boot prints on the moon. Or maybe we think of the space shuttle missions, of human-bearing rockets streaking into the sky. Say "space travel," in other words, and most of us automatically think of humans. Yet Curiosity, remarkably, has managed to become a space celebrity -- the next step in the continuum that contains Aldrin and Armstrong and Glenn -- in every way but the big one. It (rather, she) is a machine that we have effectively turned into a human.

 

And Curiosity is, in that, the conclusion of a lengthy struggle. Manned space travel was never a foregone conclusion. From the earliest years of the space program, advocates within NASA and outside of it fought for purely robotic travel, making a compelling case that machines were better suited to exploring the unknown frontier of space. What resulted was an ongoing argument about the merits of man and machine -- a contest over who, or what, would win the privilege of exploring the world beyond our own. Advocates of the machine approach had logic on their side; what they lacked was an inspiring story to tell. Curiosity, with its big personality, inspiring background and charming penchant for selfie-shooting, is the ultimate compromise between the two sides: the humanized robot.

 

This is the story of that early contest between man and machine -- and how not humans, but the human imagination, finally, won.

 

The Space Cyborg

 

Today, with the whitewash of time, we tend of think of Alan Shepard's successful launch into space as a victory in every sense: for humanity, for progress, for a United States that was battling the Soviets for supremacy in the highest of skies. Shepard's space shot was, indeed, celebrated; it was also, however, a source of an anxiety. Even in an age that revered machines and all their conveniences, people worried about the power that technology was establishing over their lives. And the obvious fact of Shepard's flight was that Shepard himself hadn't done much flying. He was basically along for the ride -- a passenger of a pre-programmed machine that streaked its way into space. In his Selling Outer Space, the scholar James Kauffman notes that Shepard's flight, for all the accomplishment it represented, sent another message, too: that the machines, just as people feared, were taking something away from humans.

 

Which left NASA, the taxpayer-funded agency, with a dilemma: How do you get people to care about -- to be excited about, to be inspired by -- accomplishments that are, at their core, victories for machines? How do you sell accomplishments that are ultimately technological ... without stoking people's anxieties about technology's power?

 

You do exactly what NASA has been doing with Curiosity: you emphasize the people within, and behind, the machines. You play up the human aspects of the cyborg. And you sell that message to the media. (As one Newsweek story described the astronaut who would follow Shepard: "John Glenn: One Machine That Worked Without Flaw.") After the first few Mercury flights, NASA began changing its wording in the speeches and testimonies its officials delivered to the public and to Congress. "The most important thing," the Apollo astronaut Edward White put it, "is that man -- not the automatic machine -- is the primary system in space flight." The agency began referring to the space "capsules" ridden by Shepard, Glenn, and Carpenter as, instead, space "craft." ("Capsule," James Kauffman points out, implies human passivity; "craft" implies human control.) And those craft were not ridden, according to NASA, so much as flown.

 

The Mercury astronauts may well have been, as Chuck Yeager put it, "Spam in a can"; NASA, however, made a point a referring to them as "pilots" -- which it could fairly do, since the Mercury Seven were, after all, plucked from the ranks of U.S. fighter pilots. The facts of the flights didn't change -- save for the astronauts' ability to adjust the attitude of their capsules, the men were, effectively, passengers -- but the language did. After his flight, Glenn wrote of "flying" the capsule "myself" -- adding that the experience proved that "man's capabilities are needed in space." In the future, the early astronaut continued, we will be able to -- and we should -- "put less automation into the machines" and make a spacecraft's human pilot even more "a part of the system."

 

Glenn -- a man who, per The New York Times, "epitomizes a giant step in that constant, driving process to blend the human being and the machine into a unit of high harmony" -- was acknowledging the cyborg necessities of space travel. But he was also defining the pants-wearer of the unit: the human, the adventurer, the American. In one of the articles Alan Shepard wrote in Life magazine, the first astronaut took a telling dig at the first cosmonaut. Yuri Gagarin, Shepard noted, had had a "fine long ride," but "he was a passenger all the way."

 

The Decision to Man the Moon

 

The early astronauts advocated for themselves like this in large part because manned space travel -- the kind we automatically associate with "space travel" today -- was by no means an inevitability. President Eisenhower had called for a stop to manned flight programs beyond Project Mercury. And President Kennedy was initially indecisive about a manned mission to the moon. As were, apparently, his employees at NASA, many of whom believed, correctly, that unmanned excursions -- the very kind that Curiosity represents today-- would be more efficient and less dangerous than versions that would involve humans. Only four days before Kennedy finally decided on his space policy, asking Congress to commit to a manned lunar landing, Hugh Dryden, NASA's deputy administrator, gave testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Dryden was asked what practical use there might be to putting a man on the moon. His reply? "It certainly does not make any sense to me."

 

Four days later, however, Kennedy would make the sense on NASA's behalf: presenting a victory in space as a way to win "the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny," the president asked Congress to commit funds for "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

 

At that point, the indecision ended: the goal had been decisively articulated, and that goal was footsteps on the moon. "Space travel," in the public imagination, would thereafter mean "manned space travel." After Kennedy's speech, James Kauffman notes, "NASA officials testifying before congressional committees never failed to offer justifications for a manned lunar landing."

 

'The Pioneer Spirit of This Great Nation'

 

Manned missions had obvious appeal; humans are relatable and unpredictable and thus dramatic in a way that machines simply are not. As Newsweek put it, "No satellite, no matter how ingenious or scientifically valuable, can match the ageless human drama of the individual -- solitary, questing, vulnerable -- facing the unknown." And no entity recognized this more clearly than the one NASA relied on to tell, and to sell, its vision of manned moon adventures: the media. "Man-in-space," William Boot notes, "makes for a much more readable -- or viewable -- story than machines." Which meant that journalists had a vested interest in human-conducted space flight. "Simply stated," Kauffman puts it, "manned space exploration would sell more magazines and newspapers than unmanned exploration would have sold."

 

And what sold even more magazines -- and, with them, NASA's vision -- was the framing of the lunar mission as the logical extension of American, and human, destiny. Man must go to the moon, Edwin Thompson declared in an editorial, because his "destiny compels him to explore every unknown, every unattainable summit." He "must go to space because it is there, just as America was there, and the U.S. West was there." Kennedy, giving a medal of achievement to the Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper (whose orbital flight NASA had cannily scheduled on the anniversary of Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic sojourn), made a point of noting that in America's "rather settled society," the astronauts had "demonstrated that there are great frontiers still to be crossed." When NASA asked Congress, inevitably, for more money to fund the Apollo programs, Richard Fulton acquiesced, the Tennessee representative said, because exploring the moon "is in keeping with the pioneer spirit of this great Nation."

 

The investment in manned missions to the moon had another effect: they soothed the technological anxieties stirred up by the Mercury program. Apollo would put technology at the mercy of man, not the other way around. The New York Times would characterize Carpenter's flight as taking place "in the tradition of the pioneers of a century ago." Lyndon Johnson, who would continue stewardship of the Apollo program after Kennedy's assassination, would refer to the astronauts as "brave pioneers." Space travel wasn't a matter of man at the mercy of machines, this logic insisted. It was instead a continuation of the oldest story there is: humanity, transcending nature. Apollo represented technology being put to use for human ends. Because it simply had to represent that. "Man," the representative Thomas Lane declared, "must be the master of this technological progress, not its robot slave."

 

The Robot Takes Selfies

 

This is, in large part, the logic that led to the space shuttle program. It is in large part the logic that led to Skylab, and to its contemporary successor, the International Space Station. NASA, of course, has invested much in its unmanned adventures, from the Mariner machines that explored Mars in the 1960s to the Voyager craft that is somewhere in the farthest edges of the solar system. But the messaging, despite all this, has been clear: when it comes to space as a force of inspiration, it's humans, all the way down. Scientists themselves have acknowledged this. "A space program without man," the scientist Simon Ramo admitted, "has much less useful prestige appeal."

 

That might all serve as simply more ammunition in today's ongoing debates about manned versus unmanned space travel. But this is where Curiosity's example is instructive. Because what's notable about the six-wheeled Martian robot is that it, too, is an extension of NASA's emphasis on manned space travel. It is in many ways the ultimate expression of the space cyborg of John Glenn's vision. It's certainly not the first robot to be humanized -- in 2008, the Mars Phoenix lander was sending cheeky tweets to more than 10,000 followers -- but it is the first to be humanized in an age of saturated social media. In the (Earth) year it has spent on Mars, Curiosity has sent more than 2,000 tweets. It has taken multiple selfies. It has delivered Morse code to the dusts of the Martian surface. It has been thoroughly anthropomorphized in a way that makes it, actually, relatable to humans.

 

Oh, and it has done some science and stuff. But so have many, many other machines under NASA's purview. What makes Curiosity unique -- why we care that today is its Marsfall anniversary -- is that NASA has managed to to make us think of the rover not just as a machine, but as a humanoid little creature, merrily exploring another planet on our behalf. When Gordon Cooper completed the final Mercury flight in 1963, Newsweek remarked that "once more, the ancient drama of the solitary individual against the elements was re-enacted." NASA has appropriated that mythology on Curiosity's behalf. The agency has framed the machine as a pioneer in the spirit of Lewis and Lindbergh, the solitary striver exploring an unknown world in the name of exploration itself. It has presented Curiosity, the robot, as its own kind of astronaut.

 

NASA's Curiosity rover celebrates 1 year on Mars

 

Alicia Chang - Associated Press

 

Mount Sharp has beckoned Curiosity since the NASA rover made its grand entrance on Mars exactly a year ago, dangling from nylon cables to a safe landing.

 

If microbes ever existed on Mars, the mountain represents the best hope for preserving the chemical ingredients that are fundamental to all living things.

 

After a poky but productive start, Curiosity recently pointed its wheels south, rolling toward the base of Mount Sharp in a journey that will last many months. Expect Curiosity to channel its inner tourist as it drives across the rock-strewn landscape, dodging bumps and taking in the scenery.

 

"We do a lot of off-roading on a lot of little dirt roads," said mission manager Jennifer Trosper.

 

Curiosity will unpack its toolkit once it arrives at its destination to hunt for the organic building blocks of life.

 

Scientists have been eager for a peek of Mount Sharp since Curiosity, the size of a small SUV, touched down in an ancient crater near the Martian equator on the night of Aug. 5, 2012.

 

The world wondered whether Curiosity would nail its landing, which involved an acrobatic plunge through the thin atmosphere that ended with it being gently lowered to the ground with cables.

 

Engineers had to invent new tricks since Curiosity was too massive to bounce to a landing cocooned in airbags - the preferred choice for previous rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

 

After seven terrifying minutes, a voice echoed through mission control at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."

 

Scientists and engineers clad in matching sky-blue polo shirts erupted in cheers. Some were so excited that they overshot their high-fives.

 

Curiosity became a pop sensation. Several of Curiosity's handlers including Bobak "Mohawk Guy" Ferdowsi became science rock stars.

 

The technical prowess required to pull off such a landing has "captured the imagination of a whole new generation of prospective explorers," said American University space policy professor Howard McCurdy, who has closely followed the $2.5 billion mission.

 

Mission scientist Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan remained calm until the last ten seconds. "Then it hit me - it's crazy! It was an unbelievable feeling of relief when the first picture from the rover came down," Atreya said.

 

Mike Malin, who operates Curiosity's cameras, ticked off two of his favorite pictures from the mission so far: A view of the rover's heat shield falling away right before landing and a color portrait of Mount Sharp.

 

"That looks so much like Utah that it felt very familiar," said Malin, who heads Malin Space Science Systems.

 

Once the euphoria of landing wore off, the six-wheel, nuclear-powered rover went to work, spending two months testing its instruments and systems. The health checks took longer than expected because Curiosity was a complex machine.

 

To celebrate the landing anniversary, engineers commanded one of Curiosity's instruments to play "Happy Birthday" as the rover took a break from driving.

 

Scientists initially hoped to head to Mount Sharp late last year, but decided to take a detour to an intriguing spot near the landing site where three different types of terrain intersected.

 

Curiosity discovered rounded pebbles - clear evidence of an ancient streambed. It also fulfilled one of the mission's main goals. By drilling into a rock and analyzing its chemistry, Curiosity concluded that Gale Crater possessed the right environmental conditions to support primitive life. It's not equipped to look for microbes, living or extinct.

 

With Curiosity busy studying rocks and dirt, the start date for the mountain trek kept getting pushed back. At one point, the team declined to predict anymore.

 

Now that it's finally on the move, scientists hope to keep stops to a minimum. Along the way, Curiosity will take pictures, check the weather, track radiation and fire its laser at rocks.

 

Curiosity was such a smash that NASA is preparing for an encore performance in 2021 using the same landing technology. Budget willing, the next rover will be able to collect rocks and store them on the Martian surface for a possible future mission to pick up and ferry back to Earth.

 

NASA has high hopes Mars rover's winning streak will continue

 

Irene Klotz - Reuters

 

The NASA rover Curiosity survived its daredevil landing on Mars one year ago Tuesday and went on to discover that the planet most like Earth in the solar system could indeed have supported microbial life, the primary goal of the mission.

 

"The stunning thing is that we found it all so quickly," California Institute of Technology geologist and lead project scientist John Grotzinger said on Monday during a ceremony at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, marking the rover's first anniversary on Mars.

 

"If you asked me a year ago, 'What are you going to find in the first year?' I wouldn't have ever said we were going to find what we went looking for," added Curiosity scientist Ken Edgett, with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

 

Now scientists hope to learn whether life-friendly niches on Mars are common and whether any organic carbon has been preserved in the planet's ancient rocks.

 

To answer those questions, Curiosity is heading to Mount Sharp, a three-mile high (five-km) mound of layered sediment rising from the floor of Gale Crater, where the one-ton rover touched down at 1:31 a.m. EDT on August 6, 2012.

 

To land that much weight in such a specific location, engineers devised a complicated descent system that included a never-before-tried hovering platform that gently lowered the rover with tethers onto the planet's surface and then, so it wouldn't land on Curiosity, was directed away to crash-land elsewhere.

 

The drama, which a NASA video dubbed "the seven minutes of terror," opened with rocket burns to slow down Curiosity from its 13,000 mph (21,000 km per hour) interplanetary cruising speed and direct it into the thin Martin atmosphere.

 

Within seven minutes, the rover dropped from seven times the speed of sound to zero, shedding a heat shield, parachutes and the hovering platform in the process.

 

"I've probably seen that video 100 times in the last year and you still think about how you felt that night, still in wonderment that it really did what it did," said NASA project manager Pete Theisinger.

 

Rather than heading first to Mount Sharp, scientists decided to explore a region that showed telltale signs of past flowing water. Drilling into a piece of bedrock, the rover found all the chemicals needed to support simple microbial life, such as microorganisms that rely on chemicals rather than sunlight, for energy.

 

"It all added up to an understanding of this environment as being chemically favorable for life - not in a harsh way, but actually quite a benign environment that is very much like Earth," Grotzinger said.

 

Curiosity is expected to be joined next year by another NASA robotic probe, called MAVEN, which will remain in orbit to assess how and why the planet is losing its atmosphere.

 

MAVEN's data will be combined with ongoing studies by Curiosity, NASA's long-lived Mars rover Opportunity, and a trio of orbiters, including the European Space Agency's Mars Express, to better understand how a planet that seemed to start off so much like Earth ended up so different.

 

MAVEN arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday. It is scheduled to launch from the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on November 18 and arrive at Mars in September 2014.

 

An Earth Year on Mars

 

Kenneth Chang - New York Times

 

On the first anniversary of its landing, halfway through its primary mission to Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover still has a long way to go.

 

To be exact, 4.4 miles. That is the distance to the foothills of Mount Sharp, an 18,000-foot mountain whose rocks could provide clues to a time on Mars when life could have thrived.

 

Because Curiosity is driving at a careful pace — up to 100 yards a day — the journey will take eight or nine months.

 

For now, science is secondary as Curiosity crawls across a barren, largely uninteresting landscape. "Pretty much pure driving, pedal to the metal," said John P. Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist.

 

An interactive feature offers a chronology of where Curiosity has been and what it has done so far; new images and information will be added as the rover progresses.

 

According to NASA, Curiosity has already traveled more than a mile, taken more than 36,700 images and fired 75,000 laser shots to analyze rocks and soil.

 

The first day — or sol, the term for a Martian day, which is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth — began in the early morning of Aug. 6, 2012. (At mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, it was late on Aug. 5.) The spacecraft carrying Curiosity pierced the top of the Martian atmosphere at more than 13,000 miles per hour.

 

In precisely choreographed maneuvers so risky that NASA called them "seven minutes of terror," Curiosity was dropped to an undamaged standstill on the surface.

 

The rover, roughly the size of a car, ended up right where it had been aimed — within Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide scar from an asteroid impact at least 3.5 billion years ago. In that time layers of sediment filled much of the crater, which were then somehow carved away, leaving Mount Sharp at the center.

 

Observations from orbit pointed to the presence of clay minerals at the base of the mountain, named in honor of Robert P. Sharp, a prominent geologist and Mars expert. Because clays form in water that has a neutral pH, that made Gale Crater a promising place to look for signs that Mars could have once been hospitable for life.

 

Before it headed toward Mount Sharp, Dr. Grotzinger's team decided to send Curiosity on a detour to investigate terrain that looked to be an intriguing confluence of three different rock types. Along the way, Curiosity spotted what looked like an ancient streambed. At the site, in the first rock it drilled on Feb. 8 (Sol 182), it struck the jackpot — clays.

 

This rock in this part of Mars formed in watery conditions that were surprisingly Earthlike. "Unquestionably, Mars was a habitable planet in its ancient past," Dr. Grotzinger said. Curiosity, however, does not have instruments that can directly search for life, past or present.

 

Although the primary mission is scheduled for only two years, Curiosity could be exploring Mars far longer. "It looks great," said Jennifer H. Trosper, the deputy project manager. "I think over all the rover has worked better than expected."

 

But lest anyone think that everything on the $2.5 billion mission would always work perfectly, a computer memory glitch in late February knocked Curiosity out of action for a couple of weeks. "This is a very sober reminder that the rover ultimately has a finite lifetime," Dr. Grotzinger said.

 

NASA scientist calls Curiosity's first year on Mars 'awesome'

 

Amina Khan - Los Angeles Times

 

On the first anniversary of NASA's rover Curiosity's touchdown in Gale Crater, Mars Science Laboratory lead scientist John Grotzinger says the team has a lot to be thankful for — and much more to look forward to. The Caltech geologist spoke with The Times about the risks the team took, the groundbreaking findings early in the mission and what they plan to do when they finally reach their goal: Mt. Sharp, the mountain in the middle of Gale Crater.

 

Curiosity's mission was to search for habitable environments — places where microbial life could have potentially existed. And it found one before even getting close to Mt. Sharp. How do you guys feel about that?

 

It's pretty awesome. We did not just find a habitable environment but one that's actually very benign.

 

It's nice to have that in the bag, and all the concerns we might have had about being able to find a target like that are taken care of. And it makes us go into a more mature, more relaxed phase of the mission. We're still going to take our time to make sure that we really study things carefully along the way, but we're really excited now to move as quickly as possible to Mt. Sharp — and investigate what we hope could be more habitable environments there.

 

What's next, now that you've found a place that was once friendly to life?

 

We're excited to be able to go through and basically document the diversity over which habitable environments might have existed on Mars. Different types of habitable environments — that might be the first thing.

 

When we get to the base of Mt. Sharp, we see evidence for the alteration of water, and we've basically got a parfait of three layers that we want to examine, distributed over hundreds of meters. The lower one is a hematite-rich unit, and then above that is the original clay-rich unit that we were always excited about, and then above that is the sulfate unit that we're interested in.

 

And the second thing is, we still are very interested in looking for organic carbon. That's a tall order.

 

How do you feel about the risks you took in choosing the landing site, Gale Crater?

 

These are the stuff that great missions of exploration are made of. Nobody discovers anything new by not taking any risk. And so for us the first one came really with choosing the landing site. And that was not straightforward. We had four excellent candidates, some of which, for a single attribute, may have been clearer prospects than Gale was.

 

But what Gale really gave us was a set of exploration targets, not just one. It's by far the most diverse of the four landing sites. You don't want just one objective; you want multiple objectives. If one doesn't work, you have a backup plan.

 

And then, faced with the prospect of climbing this mountain three miles high, it became a no-brainer. Everybody wanted to go to the mountain [laughs]. But none of us predicted just how beautiful the view was when we landed … so we have never regretted it. It's just worked out really well.

 

Where you surprised by the attention Curiosity received?

 

I'm frankly amazed at how much public interest there is in Curiosity. It far exceeds anything we ever imagined. After it landed, because it was so popular because of the 'seven minutes of terror,' we kind of thought it would spike and go away, and I think to some degree it has. But it's amazing to me how many people follow it. And I think it may have been just the right mission for this country at just the right time.

 

When I travel, I run into people. For one reason or another we start chatting, and they follow the mission.

 

Curiosity's sort of become the people's vehicle. We get all kinds of engagement, and it's just remarkable. I'm always impressed that the interest is out there.

 

Curiosity's two-year mission has been extended, but for how long?

 

I would well imagine that as long as the rover is healthy and operating fine that NASA will be able to keep us funded in some capacity.

 

Did Curiosity's initial successes play a role in the announcement of a 2020 rover?

 

Unquestionably. The architecture was always there in the Mars program, but I think everybody was waiting to see what happened on landing. And if it had gone the other way, a lot of people would have guessed that that announcement wouldn't have happened so quickly, if at all. So I think NASA was wise to look at the public interest and the excitement and make that statement about the next rover. Of course, we in the Mars community, we're thrilled about that.

 

Are scientists and engineers still excited, or has the buzz in the control room died down?

 

It's amazing. I think if you were to talk to people, they would tell you the year has just flown by. This mission is many things, but one thing it is not is boring.

 

And it's such an amazingly capable vehicle. We just get good at doing one thing and somebody comes up with an idea that's a great combination of engineering and science — thinking, you know, if we did some testing in the test bed, we could prove up a new capability that we could try out on Mars. So we're trying to look at new capabilities [for the instruments].

 

One year on Mars and still roving: What has Curiosity gleaned so far?

 

Pete Spotts - Christian Science Monitor

 

One year into a 23-month mission, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has assured its place in the history of planetary exploration as the most ambitious and one of the most successful attempts to date to explore the surface of another planet.

 

Even before the rover and its package of 10 science instruments wrapped up their first year of measurements, Curiosity's data allowed the mission's science team to answer the broadest question it had designed the rover to answer: Did Mars ever have an environment hospitable to microbial life?

 

Its testing ground: Gale Crater and the layered foothills of Mt. Sharp, a wind-smoothed mountain whose summit rises 18,000 feet from the crater floor.

 

But Curiosity didn't have to scale the foothills of Mt. Sharp to find the answer. It lay in the rover's own backyard. Rock formations within several hundred yards of the rover's landing site provided the answer: a resounding "yes."

 

The science team already had reason to suspect this might be the case, judging from the images and other data from orbiters NASA had sent in its initial quest to "follow the water" in the hunt for habitability. The images suggested that water flowed through – and perhaps pooled in – the crater billions of years ago.

 

Researchers picked Curiosity's landing site on the basis of what looked to be cemented deposits exposed on the surface. Landing on or near these rocks would give them an early look at potentially revealing rock formations, provide scientifically interesting targets even as instruments were still undergoing their on-Mars tests, and serve as a hedge in case the rover malfunctioned later in the mission.

 

After a remarkable "sky crane" landing system put Curiosity's six wheels on the surface, the rover provided spectacular confirmation of once-flowing water in the crater, as well as of standing water.

 

It came in the form of rock outcroppings, themselves conglomerations of naturally cemented pebbles, which represent the jackpot find so far, according to Darby Dyer, a planetary scientist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.

 

"We know that Mars is largely a volcanic planet but that there's been a lot of reworking" of the original volcanic rock, says Dr. Dyer, a member of the team gathering and analyzing data from Curiosity's ChemCam, a laser-spectrometer combo mounted on the rover's six-foot-tall mast. Of particular interest are so-called sedimentary rocks, which form in the presence of water.

 

"This is the first mission where we've seen the whole spectrum of sedimentary rocks," she says. These rocks are common on Earth, but researchers have never had close-ups of these same rock types on Mars.

 

Having those in hand represent "the most exciting thing on the mission, by far," she says.

 

The rocks speak to a time in Mars' distant past when water flowed for prolonged periods through Gale Crater – certainly longer than weeks or months, according to a formal analysis of the outcroppings published in the journal Science on May 31.

 

Water at least three feet deep and flowing at a pace of more than 1.6 miles an hour would have been needed to keep the largest pebbles in the conglomerate rolling along, noted a team led by Rebecca Williams, a senior scientist with the Planetary Sciences Institute in Tucson, Ariz., in the paper. The researchers deduced the long duration of the flow from the rounded edges of the outcroppings themselves.

 

Other analyses indicate that the soil and water chemistry at the time would have been mild enough to allow microbial life to thrive – a low salt content and clay minerals that speak of water perhaps fresh enough to drink.

 

Yet evidence for liquid water, widely seen as crucial for organic life, was only one leg of a triangle of potential habitability Curiosity revealed, notes John Grotzinger, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the mission's lead scientist.

 

The rover also showed that all of the key chemical building blocks for life – oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and carbon – were present on Mars.

 

But organisms also need a source of energy, he continues. Researchers on Earth have uncovered remarkable communities of creatures in the deep ocean that draw their energy from chemicals that well up from under the crust at searingly hot hydrothermal vents or even at cold seeps, which release methane.

 

The team found minerals with characteristics that would have allowed them to serve as meals for microbes, he says.

 

Even Curiosity's observations of the atmosphere's chemical make-up appear to add weight to a more-habitable past for the red planet.

 

The measurements present a definitive confirmation of early measurements indicating that over time, Mars lost its initial inventory of lighter elements to space. Without an Earth-like global magnetic field to serve as a deflector shield, charged particles that make up the solar wind were able to strip the atmosphere of lighter elements over time as the wind flowed past the planet.

 

A denser atmosphere in the past would have helped the planet retain its surface water for prolonged periods.

 

In addition, Curiosity took measurements of radiation from the sun and from the rest of the galaxy during its 325-million-mile cruise to Mars. The upshot for a human mission: Just the trip to and from the red planet would lead to astronaut radiation exposures that approach or exceed current career limits, based on shielding currently being built into NASA's crew-exploration vehicle.

 

On July 4, the rover began its five-mile, multimonth trip to Mt. Sharp's foothills, the mission's ultimate destination. Using photos taken from orbit, the science team has identified potential spots along the way that appear to merit closer study.

 

The first of these is less than a kilometer from Curiosity's current location, says mission manager Rick Welch. Curiosity should reach the location within the next four to six weeks. If the site turns out to be as interesting up close as it looks from afar, researchers may dally there for a few weeks to explore it before resuming Curiosity's trek.

 

If Curiosity already has hit a towering home run with its results so far, what's left?

 

"We'd like to get more of them on the scoreboard," Dr. Grotzinger says. The team has sampled only one kind of potential habitat, he explains. The layers in the foothills of Mt. Sharp represent increasingly recent periods of time with altitude. Minerals detected from orbit suggest that they may represent other sorts of habitats that flowing or standing water on the crater floor might have erased there.

 

Assessing a range of potential habitats on Mars will serve to guide future missions that aim to return samples or look for evidence of ancient life.

 

Indeed, on July 9 NASA announced that its next rover mission to Mars would aim to hunt specifically for signs of past life on the red planet. And it would cache samples that later could be returned to Earth. The announcement follows a December announcement from John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science, that the agency would launch another rover to Mars in 2020. In February the agency appointed a science panel to give the mission some broad definition.

 

Instead of drilling into rock and sampling the resulting powder, as Curiosity does, planers envision a drill for the 2020 rover that would extract intact core samples, which not only contain information about the chemical composition of individual layers in a sample, but also give researchers a relative sense for the age of any layer bearing interesting chemistry.

 

In addition, the new rover – to be built largely from Curiosity's blueprints – is expected to carry on-board labs and analytical tools able to detect fossilized cells, as well as minerals and organic chemicals produced via biological activity.

 

Mars anniversary: Rock star rover's five coolest finds

 

Lisa Grossman - New Scientist

 

One Earth year ago, the world held its breath as NASA's Curiosity rover plunged through the Martian atmosphere to begin a nail-biting descent to the Red Planet's surface. Since its celebrated touchdown on 6 August 2012 (or 5 August if you were on Pacific Standard Time), the rover has been busy firing its laser and tasting the soil, now it is gearing up for a 5 kilometre climb up a mound called Mount Sharp. Here are our picks of the five coolest things we have learned from Curiosity so far.

 

1. The risk of a ride to Mars

Curiosity was making discoveries even before it landed on Mars. While the rover was still folded up inside its travel capsule, its Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) was picking up energetic cosmic rays, which stream through the solar system and can damage biological tissue.

 

NASA limits an astronaut's acceptable radiation dose to a 3 per cent risk of exposure-induced death over a lifetime. But it is hard to know how much radiation astronauts will accumulate on a trip to Mars, because most of our information comes from crews on the International Space Station, which is still within Earth's protective magnetic shield.

 

The RAD results suggested that a round trip would get astronauts close to the lifetime limit, which could be worrying. NASA and private companies are therefore paying closer attention to innovative new radiation shields for human missions.

 

2. How to land softly

The previous two NASA rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, bounced their way onto the Red Planet wrapped in airbags. But at 10 times the weight of its smaller siblings, Curiosity would have punched through similar coverings. Enter the James Bond-esque sky crane, a hovering craft that lowered Curiosity to Gale Crater on the Martian surface, using nylon tethers.

 

"A year ago around this time, there were obviously severe doubts from outside the project and the lab about whether Curiosity would land successfully," says Allen Chen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

 

Rover engineers believe a scaled-up sky crane could be one way to safely land astronauts on Mars, meaning Curiosity's first act could be a step towards a human presence on the Red Planet.

 

3. A river ran through it

After arriving on Mars, Curiosity began trying to figure out if the planet had once been able to support life. Just over a month in, it made its first big splash: evidence of an ancient river bed where water used to flow vigorously.

 

Earlier missions had revealed gullies and hydrated minerals elsewhere on Mars that suggested the surface was once wet, but it was not clear whether that water was in a stagnant pool or ran in a stream. Curiosity examined three outcrops made of thin layers of rock that had been cemented together and that contained rounded pebbles.

 

The roundness indicated that the rocks had tumbled over long distances, and their size – a few centimetres wide – meant they were too big to be propelled by wind. In September, the team concluded that the region must have been sculpted by flowing water, possibly up to hip deep.

 

4. Mars water was life-friendly

To collect even more clues about Mars's habitable past, Curiosity carries a drill that can deliver samples to its on-board chemistry lab for analysis. In February, the rover drilled about 5 centimetres into rusty red rock in a region of Gale Crater called Yellowknife Bay. The team saw grey rock beneath it – a sign that they were about to sample material protected from surface weathering.

 

"I tend to think that the great highlight was being able to drill the hole and see grey Mars," says John Grotzinger, the rover's principal investigator. "We just knew that we were peering into something that was going to turn out real well." Sure enough, that very first taste of Martian insides revealed evidence of a definitively habitable environment that once had non-acidic, slightly salty water and minerals that could have provided an energy source to anything living there.

 

5. When Mars's atmosphere thinned

Although Curiosity paints a picture of ancient Mars as a wet and welcoming world, the present-day Red Planet is a harsh, cold place with only a thin shroud of an atmosphere. This suggests that the planet once had a thicker covering to help keep it warm and watery. So where did this covering go? Curiosity drew its first breath of Martian air in late 2012 and analysed its composition. The results, combined with studies of Martian meteorites on Earth, hint that the planet's atmospheric composition has not changed substantially in about 4 billion years.

 

So, whatever thinned it out must have happened just half a billion years after the planet formed. We hope to find out more when Curiosity reaches Mount Sharp, which will provide a transition zone between rocks at the bottom, laid down by liquid, and upper layers, where minerals suddenly turn dry.

 

What's next?

Spurred by the rover's success and the way it captured the fascination of the general public and scientists alike, NASA announced in December that it will build a Curiosity clone, partially from the current mission's spare parts. Due to launch in 2020, this rover will use the same chassis and sky crane landing gear. But it will carry a new set of instruments to search directly for compounds such as organics, which would indicate ancient life.

 

It will also collect and store rock samples for a future mission to bring back to Earth. The prospect of the Mars 2020 rover has intensified interest in Curiosity's specific experiences, as well as what it teaches us about Mars. "The year has passed by like a whirlwind," says Grotzinger. "Totally aside from all the interesting stuff we're learning about the rocks, we're learning so much about the machine."

 

Year One: Mars Rover Curiosity's Key Discoveries

 

Ian O'Neill - Discovery News

 

On Aug. 5, 2012, at 10:31 p.m. PDT, I was standing in silence (with Discovery News' Irene Klotz and Amy Teitel) in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's press room with dozens of representatives from national and international media. We were all transfixed on one large TV screen that showed views from JPL mission control (a mere stone's throw from the media gathering) and flashed up computer renderings of the descending rover approaching the Martian surface.

 

As soon as the signal was received from Mars that the mission had successfully touched down inside Gale Crater, the TV depicted scenes of pure jubilation and the press room erupted first with cheers, then rapid mouseclicking as all the major news outlets released the good news to the world. The celebrations were quickly followed by the first photographs through Curiosity's eyes, marking the beginning of the mission that, very quickly, would transform our knowledge of the red planet.

 

So, just one year on from the exciting entry, descent and landing (EDL) -- a.k.a. "The Seven Minutes of Terror" -- let's review some of the key discoveries that Curiosity has made so far in its epic adventure on Mars.

 

Looks like Earth

 

As soon as Curiosity opened its camera lenses and started to image this never before seen region of Mars, the first thing that struck JPL scientists and the public alike was the instant familiarity we had with the landscape.

 

"The first impression you get is how Earth-like this seems," lead scientist John Grotzinger told reporters on Aug. 8, 2012 -- three days after landing. "You would really be forgiven for thinking that NASA was trying to pull a fast one on you and we actually put a rover out in the Mojave Desert and took a picture, a little LA smog coming in there."

 

He was referring to the haze seen in this photograph that was slightly obscuring the distant rim of Gale Crater. In the past year, the Martian atmosphere has shown itself to be highly variable, often obscuring the rover's view of its ultimate goal, Mount Sharp.

 

Applejack Liquor?

 

In the weeks that followed Curiosity's touchdown at Bradbury Landing, Curiosity tried out its sophisticated suite of instrumentation. One instrument, ChemCam (the boxy "head" of Curiosity), fired its laser at a target rock dubbed "Jake Matijevic."

 

After analyzing the results, mission scientists confirmed that not only was the rock formed through volcanic processes, it had astonishingly similar characteristics as igneous rocks found here on Earth. Interestingly, the minerals in these types of rock form from a similar process to what colonists used to make booze from apple cider.

 

Little Like Hawaii

 

The resemblance of the Martian landscape to deserts on Earth was quickly apparent; even the volcanic rock seems to have formed in the same way that they do on Earth. In the following November, Curiosity scientists had another groundbreaking discovery for the world.

 

After collecting regolith samples from a sandy rift in a geologically interesting area called "Rocknest," Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument was used to analyze a scoop of the stuff. Through X-ray diffraction analysis -- the first time the technique has been done on another planet -- the Martian soil was found to contain similar volcanic minerals as a very specific place on Earth: Hawaii.

 

A River Ran Through It

 

Curiosity's prime mission is to seek out evidence of habitability, past or present, on the Martian surface. A key criteria of "habitability" is water. Did liquid water used to flow over the Martian surface in abundance? As this jaw-dropping discovery shows, the answer is a very positive yes.

 

Near the rover's landing site, Curiosity snapped images of small rounded pebbles. Pebbles? Yes, pebbles on Mars.

 

On Earth, pebbles are formed when rocks undergo erosion by fluvial (water) action. The presence of pebbles and large slabs of sedimentary rock packed full of pebbles of different sizes -- known as conglomerates -- is evidence that Curiosity's landing site used to be a riverbed. This discovery strengthens the possibility that, if there used to be large quantities of liquid water on Mars, ancient microbial life may have been able to gain a foothold.

 

Water-Formed Minerals

 

It's one thing to discover pebbles at a certain location, but when you find evidence of minerals that could have only been formed in the presence of water, you begin to get a sense that that place used to be pretty darned wet. Of course, this place is Mars, currently one of the most barren places in the solar system... but it wasn't always this way.

 

While imaging a rock known as "John Klein," mission scientists noticed white veins of a mineral passing through the rock. After drilling actives and dust samples analyzed, its nature was confirmed. Calcium sulphate -- a.k.a. gypsum -- was found. The presence of the mineral, also discovered on the other side of the planet by NASA's veteran Mars rover Opportunity, is further evidence that Mars used to have large quantities of water on its surface.

 

Mars' Thin Air

 

Mysteriously, Curiosity can't seem to find any trace of methane in the air -- a factor that contradicts orbital data that suggests otherwise. This is one mystery that will have to go on hold for the time being. But the mystery of Mars' thin atmosphere is slowly being solved.

 

With the help of Curiosity's measurements of the Martian air, isotope analysis suggests that Mars actually had a very thick atmosphere some 4 billion years ago. Without the protection of a global magnetic field, however, the planet wasn't able to retain its atmospheric gases from the ravages of the solar wind that stripped it into space. This is one factor that likely impacted the red planet's habitability.

 

Mars Astronomer

 

Designed as the most sophisticated mechanized geologist for tens of millions of miles, Curiosity also moonlights as an astronomer. The rover has had many opportunities of watching the sun rise and set. It has also seen Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos fly overhead. And sometimes, Curiosity has the rare opportunity to spot an extraterrestrial eclipse. Shown here, Mars' largest moon partially eclipses the sun on Sept. 13, a month after landing.

 

Mars Is Unhealthy

 

To every Mars coin, there's a flip side. While the discovery of gypsum may be evidence of water action in Mars history that, in turn, suggests there may have been enough liquid water to support basic biology, gypsum is known to be toxic if breathed in by humans. Also, Curiosity has confirmed the presence of another rather nasty chemical, perchlorates. Although perchlorates are used by some hardy microbes on Earth as an energy source, the chemical is a rocket fuel oxidizer known to poison people.

 

Add that to the radiation risks, and the fact that Mars dust will likely be hard to clean from spacesuits, and Mars is looking like a very precarious place for humans to explore. But any exploration of an alien world would be dangerous, so our future Mars explorers will likely chalk these scary factors up to the risks of doing bold things in space.

 

Litter, Rats and Orchids

 

This isn't a Curiosity discovery per se; it's more of a study into the human fascination with Mars and how NASA's rover has facilitated that interest.

 

Scouring over the gigabytes of data streaming from Curiosity, eagle-eyed armchair space explorers have spotted some strange things in the pictures snapped by NASA's mission. First up, when scooping samples of Mars dirt in October, a shiny object was spotted by Curiosity's wheels. Sadly, it wasn't proof of an alien snakeskin, it was in fact a piece of plastic from the rover itself. Add that to the growing list of Mars rats and random Mars flowers and we quickly realize that the phenomenon of pareidolia is alive and well.

 

But this also proves that we just can't keep our eyes off this incredible mission to Mars.

 

Curiosity rover celebrates one-year anniv. since 'seven minutes of terror'

 

Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.com

 

A year ago today, the world watched and waited for the moment of truth, as many months of planning and preparation finally gave way to the "Seven Minutes of Terror." High above Mars, the incoming Curiosity rover was about to become the United States' fourth successfully operated rover to land and traverse the surface of the Red Planet. However, unlike its predecessors—Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity—the large size and mass of Curiosity meant that an airbag-cushioned touchdown was out of the question. Instead, the 1,980-pound rover depended upon a complex array of parachutes, retrorockets, and a never-before-tried "Sky Crane" to guide it to a pinpoint landing within the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. In an event which proved as much a miracle as a technological triumph, it succeeded, and Curiosity's first year has revolutionized our understanding of Mars … so much so that in December 2012 its mission was reportedly extended indefinitely.

 

Curiosity's journey to the Red Planet began from Space Launch Complex (SLC)-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., in November 2011, atop an Atlas V booster. A little over eight months later, on the night of 5/6 August 2012, it was readied for the perilous, seven-minute-long Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) maneuver, which placed it within a "landing ellipse" of just 12 x 4.3 miles, far narrower than anything attempted by any previous mission. Throughout the process, Curiosity operated autonomously, according to pre-loaded software parameters, and was watched "live" by an estimated 3.2 million people on NASA TV, cable networks, or online.

 

Folded within an "aeroshell" for the bulk of its voyage to Mars, Curiosity separated from its cruise stage about ten minutes ahead of atmospheric entry. Shortly thereafter, thrusters on the aeroshell were fired to cancel out the spacecraft's slow rotation and the process of entering Mars' atmosphere began. Protected by a 15-foot-wide heat shield of phenolic impregnated carbon ablator, the cocooned rover survived peak temperatures of 2,090 degrees Celsius and a maximum deceleration of around 15 G. Ejectable ballast mass weights were deployed at several key stages during entry, and reaction control thrusters were fired to provide the aeroshell with sufficient "lift" during this highly dynamic phase.

 

Within minutes, the incoming spacecraft had slowed to Mach 1.7, and at an altitude of about 6.2 miles above the surface, a 52-foot-diameter parachute was deployed, after which the heat shield separated. Above, in orbit around the Red Planet, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) photographed the parachute deployment. Falling further into the atmosphere, the rover and its descent stage separated from the aeroshell at a velocity of 220 mph and an altitude of 1.1 miles. The descent stage consisted of a platform above Curiosity, armed with eight hydrazine engines, which provided 90-700 pounds of variable thrust to slow the descent, after which the Sky Crane lowered the rover with a 25-foot-long tether to a soft, wheels-down landing on the red-hued surface. After detecting and confirming "Weight on Wheels," a series of pyrotechnic charges cut cables to free Curiosity from the descent stage, which then flew away to a crash landing about 2,100 feet away.

 

Simply reading that description of Curiosity's arrival on Mars makes it all the more remarkable that it was pulled off at all, let alone that it was pulled off entirely without incident, although not without a certain amount of nail-biting tension on the part of the mission control team and space enthusiasts around the world. Curiosity achieved Weight on Wheels on the Martian surface at 10:17 p.m. PDT on 5 August (1:17 a.m. EDT and 5:17 a.m. UTC on 6 August 2012) and touched down less than 1.5 miles from its target … after a 350-million-mile journey. Firm confirmation of its successful landing reached the ears of an exuberant flight control team about 14 minutes later.

 

Its landing site was Gale Crater, an enormous impact basin, 96 miles wide and estimated at somewhere between 3.5 and 3.8 billion years old. Within the crater lies the forbidding 18,000-foot peak of Aeolis Mons ("Mount Sharp"). And here, for the last Earth-year, Curiosity has conducted a truly astounding program of scientific observation and discovery which the whole world has had the opportunity to share and experience.

 

Since landing, the rover—essentially a six-wheeled mobile laboratory—has provided more than 190 gigabits of data, returned more than 36,700 full images and 35,000 thumbnail images, fired more than 75,000 laser shots to investigate the composition of soils, driven more than a mile, and directly collected and analyzed samples from two separate rocks. Its results so far have exposed geological layers which originated in a wet environment, and examinations of pebble-like deposits have hinted strongly at the presence of ancient, vigorous-flowing stream beds.

 

"We now know Mars offered favorable conditions for microbial life, billions of years ago," said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "It has been gratifying to succeed, but that has also whetted our appetites to learn more. We hope those enticing layers at Mount Sharp will preserve a broad diversity of other environmental conditions that could have affected habitability."

 

To commemorate its year on the surface, NASA has released a video and plans events on NASA Television and the agency's website on Tuesday, 6 August. There will also be a live public event from NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., which is expected to include agency officials and Expedition 36 crew members aboard the International Space Station. "Successes of our Curiosity—that dramatic touchdown, a year ago, and the science findings since then—advance us toward further exploration, including sending humans to an asteroid and Mars," said NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden. "Wheel tracks now will lead to boot prints later."

 

NASA's Curiosity Rover Celebrates One Year on Mars

 

Mike Wall - Space.com

 

One year ago today (Aug. 5), NASA's Curiosity rover survived its harrowing and unprecedented Red Planet landing, setting off celebrations around the country.

 

The 1-ton robot has achieved a great deal in its 12 months on Mars, discovering an ancient streambed and gathering enough evidence for mission scientists to declare that the planet could have supported microbial life billions of years ago.

 

And more big finds could be in the offing, as Curiosity is now trekking toward its ultimate science destination: the foothills of a huge and mysterious mountain that preserves, in its many layers, a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions.

 

"The time has gone by quickly, but we're amazed at how much we were able to accomplish," said Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The whole thing has just been the experience of a lifetime."

 

Seven minutes of terror

 

Curiosity was too big to land cushioned inside giant airbags, as its smaller cousins Spirit and Opportunity did back in 2004, so mission engineers devised an entirely new touchdown system for the car-size rover — one that had seemingly been pulled from the pages of a sci-fi novel.

 

On the night of Aug. 5, 2012 U.S. Pacific time (early morning Aug. 6 EDT and GMT), a rocket-powered sky crane lowered Curiosity to the Martian surface on cables, then flew off and crash-landed intentionally a safe distance away.

 

The Curiosity rover team erupted in cheers at mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena when it became clear that the six-wheeled robot had survived its "seven minutes of terror" plunge through the Martian atmosphere. The celebration was echoed in New York City's Times Square and many other places, where people had gathered to watch the action live.

 

"We're on Mars again," NASA chief Charles Bolden said just minutes after Curiosity touched down inside the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater, kicking off a planned two-year surface mission to determine if the Red Planet has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. "It doesn't get any better than this," he said. [Video: Curiosity's '7 Minutes of Terror' Landing]

 

Grotzinger said the memories and emotions of landing night remain vivid 12 months later.

 

"Looking back on it, I just cannot believe it's been a year," he told SPACE.com.

 

Mission accomplished

 

Curiosity stuck close to its landing site for most of its first 12 months on the Red Planet. Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggested that rocks in the area may have been exposed to liquid water long ago, and mission scientists wanted the rover to check out these landforms.

 

The strategy quickly paid off. In September, less than two months after touchdown, the mission team announced that Curiosity had rolled through an ancient streambed, where water had flowed perhaps hip-deep in places.

 

A nearby site dubbed Yellowknife Bay turned out to be even more exciting. There, in early February, Curiosity drilled 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) into a Red Planet rock and collected samples — the first time a rover had ever performed this complicated maneuver on another world, NASA officials said.

 

Analysis of these samples allowed scientists to check off their main mission goal just seven months into Curiosity's stay on Mars. In March, the mission team announced that Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

 

"We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably — if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it," Grotzinger said at the time.

 

On to Mount Sharp

 

But Curiosity isn't resting on its laurels. Last month, the rover began the long trek to Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the Red Planet sky from Gale Crater's center.

 

Mission scientists have been targeting Mount Sharp's foothills since before Curiosity launched in November 2011. The mountain's lower reaches show signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water, while upper levels look like they've always been high and dry.

 

The Curiosity team wants the rover to climb partway up the gently sloping mountain, ideally crossing a threshold about 2,625 feet (800 meters) up that seems to separate a much wetter early Mars from the arid planet we know today.

 

"We hope that we'll be able to drive long enough and high enough to be able to cross that boundary — that'll be a really key one for us," Grotzinger said. "I think that this many-hundred-meter climb through the foothills of Mount Sharp could be just a great story in understanding the early environmental evolution of Mars."

 

The drive from the Yellowknife Bay area to Mount Sharp's base will cover about 5 miles (8 km) of straight-line distance and will probably take a year or so, rover team members say.

 

"We hope to arrive at the base of Mount Sharp and get stuck into that part of the mission probably near the end of our nominal mission of two years," Grotzinger said. "It's going to take a while to get there." (NASA officials have said they'll continue to operate Curiosity as long as the rover is scientifically viable.)

 

Curiosity's leisurely pace — its top driving speed over hard, flat ground is 0.09 mph (0.14 km/h) — isn't the only reason the drive will take so long. The team also plans to stop at various places along the way to do some science work.

 

For example, mission scientists want to know what the relationship is between the water-exposed rocks of Yellowknife Bay and Mount Sharp. Are they part of the same unit, or do they differ in age?

 

"As we drive along, we want to stop and make measurements of those rocks to try to figure out how to link Yellowknife Bay with the base of Mount Sharp," Grotzinger said. "That'll be important someday."

 

Standing on the shoulders of giants

 

Curiosity's success has already had a big impact on NASA's Mars program and the future of Red Planet exploration more broadly.

 

For instance, the space agency announced in December that it will launch another unmanned rover toward the Red Planet in 2020 — one whose chassis and landing system will be based heavily on Curiosity's hardware. The sky crane can also be used to land heavy equipment needed for an eventual human mission to the Red Planet, NASA officials have said.

 

Grotzinger said he and the rest of the rover team are proud of all that Curiosity has accomplished thus far, but he stressed that they can't take all the credit for the mission's success.

 

"It just underscores the importance and the value of NASA's Mars program," Grotzinger said. "If we looked farther, as trite as it sounds, it's because we stood on the shoulders of giants. The rover missions that came before us and the orbiter missions, and that synergy between the surface missions and the orbiter missions — it just demonstrates how well that works."

 

State of the Mission: Curiosity at Year 1

 

Jeffrey Marlow - Wired News

 

On August 6th, 2012, hundreds of scientists stormed the mission operations center at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, eager to take control of the Curiosity rover. Moments before, the blue-shirted engineering team had stuck the most improbable of landings, and the JPL campus was abuzz with celebrity guests and news crews. Over the coming weeks, members of the science team would jockey for position at overflowing work stations, scurry around hallways from meeting to meeting, and plot the course for the instruments they had worked for decades to bring to the surface of Mars. It was a dynamic – if occasionally slightly chaotic – time at mission control. The buoyant mood was contagious, and hardened scientists would often stop and stare at Curiosity's latest images, awestruck wonder trumping procedural expediency.

 

On August 6th, 2013, the scene at Curiosity's mission control will be markedly different. The engineering contingent that manages uplinks and downlinks continues its regimen, but the science team will be relatively invisible. The geologists, mineralogists, and geochemists are as engaged as ever, of course, but they're connected remotely, tethered to the mission operations center by a sophisticated architecture of network-based software and teleconferences.

 

MSL has been a grand undertaking with several flashy achievements. The fire and brimstone of launch, the ridiculous SkyCrane landing, the laser-zapping chemical analyses – all demonstrably difficult tasks. Coordinating mission operations is less glamorous, but ensuring that a car-sized rover on another planet is operated securely, efficiently, and creatively with input from around the world is no small task. Even the smallest slip-up could cripple the rover for days or irreparably damage mission hardware. And despite NASA's experience with similar challenges posed by earlier rovers, MSL's complexity adds a new degree of difficulty.

 

 

So Ashwin Vasavada, the mission's Deputy Project Scientist who helped oversee the shift to distributed operations, was understandably nervous about the transition. "Planning it on paper in the abstract before landing is one thing," he says, "but you don't really know how to do something until you actually do it." Vasavada points to the teleconference-based meetings and proprietary websharing platform as the technological glue holding the enterprise together. "These tools are proving to be pretty robust," he notes, "but we're living at the edge of what this technology can do."

 

Meanwhile, individual team members have effectively self-sorted into various working groups and strategic units, finding niches that may or may not have been the roles they originally had in mind. "On Mars time, when the whole team was at JPL, it was a little easier," Vasavada explains, "since we had the ability to quickly run around the corner and ask someone a question." Things may be running a little bit slower, but deliberation breeds attentiveness, and the strict slate of meetings and checklists keeps everything on schedule.

 

On the strategic side of the equation, Vasavada notes the opportunity cost of Curiosity's unexpectedly lengthy investigations at Yellowknife Bay. What initially began as a jaunt to "check out the high thermal inertia unit" snowballed into an extended drilling engagement that lasted several months longer than anticipated. Vasavada attributes the ballooning timeline to two factors: "The science was so good, it caused us to linger," he says, "and the things we did explore took longer than expected due to technical reasons." Curiosity's time at Yellowknife did produce some remarkable findings of past habitable conditions, but much of the team believes more distant targets hold even richer scientific paydirt.

 

So now, already halfway through its nominal two year mission, Curiosity is finally heading for the hills of the Gale Crater central mound – a putative geological wonderland that lured the rover to this particular corner of Mars in the first place. "Yellowknife dominated our first year and ended up being a really positive story in the end, but it's not what we were expecting to do," says Vasavada.

 

"That's the cost of doing something no one's ever done before."

 

One Year of Curiosity - Are We Any Closer to Sending Humans to Mars?

 

Chris Carberry - Huffington Post

 

(Carberry is Executive Director and co-founder, Explore Mars, Inc.)

 

One year ago, the world watched as the Curiosity rover was lowered to the Martian surface in one of the most spectacular engineering feats ever attempted. People assembled for special landing parties all around the globe; hundreds of people gathered after 1:00 a.m. in Times Square in New York to view the coverage of the landing on the jumbotron; and millions more viewed online. Since then, Curiosity has been sending back amazing data - providing solid evidence that Mars was once had suitable conditions to sustain life as well as providing amazing images with unprecedented resolution - and the mission has really only just begun.

 

Curiosity reminded us what we can be and what we can achieve as a nation. No other nation currently has the capacity to match that technological achievement. The public outpouring of excitement and support was clear and reenergized the question - When will we be sending humans to Mars? The public is hungry for a mission like this. Earlier this year, a scientific national public opinion poll was commissioned by Explore Mars, Inc., The Boeing Co., and Phillips and Co. that showed overwhelming support for human missions to Mars. Indeed, it showed that seventy one percent (71%) of Americans believe that we will land on Mars by 2033. From a technological perspective, this is an achievable goal, but budgetary obstacles and governmental indecision are preventing any major progress toward this goal.

 

Nobody can argue that we have significant budgetary challenges. Sequestration has impacted every federal agency. Despite this, we need to find a way to adequately invest in programs that can stimulate innovation, technology, and science. At less than half of one percent of the federal budget, NASA is not a major contributor to our budgetary woes, but it has a tremendous capacity to stimulate our economic growth. We're not even coming close to utilizing this potential. We're just shrinking NASA. No positive argument can be made for starving NASA to the point where it is unable to get anything done. That is certainly not a responsible way to utilize taxpayer funds. NASA is supposed to push the envelope of exploration and technology. It is not supposed to be merely a jobs program. We will waste some of the most talented people in the world as well as the potential for that agency to stimulate innovation, inspiration, and discovery - all of which are vital to American competitiveness.

 

However, if we want to send humans to Mars by the early 2030s, we can't do it with the model that we used for reaching the Moon. We will need more efficient ways of moving forward and to design architectures that can be accomplished with the assumption that NASA will receive flat funding for the foreseeable future. Partnerships with industry/commercial entities and well as international partnerships are essential - and in fact, there are a number of mission architecture plans designed by major players in the space community that could get us to Mars in the next couple of decades within a challenging budgetary environment, but that message doesn't seem to be getting through.

 

We are wasting the talent and passion at NASA and the broader space community. Our aerospace engineers and planetary scientists desperately want to send crews to Mars. Our international partners want us to lead an international mission to Mars. While our elected representatives can't agree on a strategy for getting us there, they now seem to agree that Mars should be the primary goal. And, the American people are strongly in favor human missions to Mars. Rather than making constant excuses for why we can't go, we need to collectively quote President Obama and say, "Yes we can!" and begin to plan one of the most significant programs in human history.

 

END