| | JSC TODAY CATEGORIES - Headlines
- Morpheus KSC Free Flight Test Today
- We Need YOU for Toys for Kids
- NASA Knowledge Policy for Programs and Projects - Organizations/Social
- Human Systems Integration ERG Monthly Meeting
- Space Serenity Al-Anon Meeting Today
- Sustainability Panel with Local Universities
- Holiday Luncheon in the Cafés Tomorrow
- Tomorrow: CoLabs Back in Action
- JSC Praise and Worship Club Meeting
- EMC Mtg: Synthetic Aperture for High-Intensity
- Sam's Club in Building 3 Café Thursday
- Toastmasters Practice Holiday Humor - Jobs and Training
- iOS7 Tricks and Tips for Everyone
- iOS7 Security Deep Dive for Developers/Security
- Thrift Savings Plan Training
- Pre-Retirement for CSRS
- Pre-Retirement for FERS |  |
| Headlines - Morpheus KSC Free Flight Test Today
Today, the Morpheus team plans the FIRST FREE FLIGHT test of its Bravo prototype lander at Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The test will be streamed live on JSC's UStream Channel. View the live stream, along with progress updates sent via twitter on the project's website. (If you are on-site, watch live on JSC HDTV channel 51-2 and IPTV channel 4512.) During this test, the autonomous untethered Morpheus prototype lander will launch from the ground over the flame trench, ascend approximately 16 meters, hover, and then translate approximately seven meters while descending to land on last year's launch pad. The test firing is planned for approximately noon CST. Streaming will begin approximately 20 minutes prior. * Note: Testing operations are very dynamic, and the actual firing time may vary. Follow Morpheus Lander on Twitter for the latest information at @MorpheusLander. (Send "follow morpheuslander" to 40404 for text.) - We Need YOU for Toys for Kids
We still have an urgent need for volunteers to staff an exhibit for the 2013 U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee Toys for Kids event at the George R. Brown (GRB) Convention Center this Saturday, Dec. 14, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Won't you consider being a part of this really fun, high-energy event? Hundreds of disadvantaged kids in Houston will be able to learn about NASA, get autographs from astronauts - and oh, by the way - visit with Santa and get a toy or two. Transportation will be provided to/from the GRB! To sign up, check out the event page on the V-CORPs website, or email V-CORPs at V-CORPs admin. - NASA Knowledge Policy for Programs and Projects
The NASA Knowledge Policy for Programs and Projects (NPD 7120.6) is official. It was signed and made effective on Nov. 26. It formalizes NASA policy to "effectively manage the agency's knowledge to cultivate, identify, retain and share knowledge" consistent with NASA strategy. The knowledge system is governed on a federated basis so that each center and mission directorate determines the best approach for its people while we share, integrate and work together on our common goals. Organizations/Social - Human Systems Integration ERG Monthly Meeting
The Human Systems Integration Employee Resource Group (HSI ERG) will hold a regular monthly meeting in Building 1, Room 220, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. today, Dec. 10. Come join the HSI ERG in learning more about crowdsourcing platforms at NASA and how they might be leveraged in your work. Steve Rader from JSC's Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation will share some of the new approaches and tools for system development and innovation using crowdsourcing platforms. His presentation will review several crowdsourcing platforms that NASA currently has contracted for use in developing systems or solving problems in innovative ways. - Space Serenity Al-Anon Meeting Today
"Celebrate" is our reminder to enjoy the wonders of life and focus on the good. Our 12-step meeting is for co-workers, families and friends of those who work or live with the family disease of alcoholism. We meet today, Dec. 10, in Building 32, Room 146 (room change), from 11 to 11:45 a.m. Visitors are welcome. - Sustainability Panel with Local Universities
The December Environmental Brown Bag will be a little different this month. We're hosting a sustainability panel with local universities (University of Houston, University of Houston-Clear Lake, Rice University and City of Houston) to learn what they're doing to improve sustainability at their facilities and how it compares to JSC. It's a fantastic chance to see what our local neighbors are doing and talk about what might be applicable to JSC. The panel is today, Dec. 10, from noon to 1 p.m. Note: For this month only, we're in a new location--Building 12, Room 200. Come by and check out all the interesting features that make Building 12 a LEED Gold building. - Holiday Luncheon in the Cafés Tomorrow
The Starport Cafés will have a special holiday lunch tomorrow, Dec. 11, in both Building 3 and Building 11. Entrées will include roast turkey or roast beef with a choice of three sides: cornbread stuffing, buttered corn, au gratin potatoes, green bean casserole, black-eyed peas and honey-glazed carrots. Also included is sweet potato or pumpkin pie for dessert--all for only $7.99 (fountain drink or tea included)! - Tomorrow: CoLabs Back in Action
CoLabs, or Collaborative Labs, brings together people across JSC interested in gestural/spatial tracking (i.e., Microsoft Kinect), as well as low-cost computing (i.e., Raspberry Pis and Arduinos). Join us tomorrow to find out how this collaborative group is getting involved with education outreach with the Aerospace Academy and a hackathon run by Heath 2.0! If you have any questions, feel free to contact Elena C. Buhay. Event Date: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 Event Start Time:12:00 PM Event End Time:1:00 PM
Event Location: Bldg 30A/Rm 2090
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Elena Buhay 281-792-7976
[top] - JSC Praise and Worship Club Meeting
Join with the praise and worship band, "Allied with the Lord," for a refreshing set of Christmas carols and traditional and contemporary praise and worship songs tomorrow, Dec. 11, from 11:15 a.m. to noon in Building 29, Room 237 (also called Creative Sp.ace). Mike FitzPatrick will also solo his popular a cappella version of "O' Holy Night" to get us in the Christmas spirit. Prayer partners will be available for anyone who would like it. All JSC civil servants and contractors are welcome. Event Date: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 Event Start Time:11:15 AM Event End Time:12:00 PM
Event Location: B29 Room 237
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Mike FitzPatrick x30758
[top] - EMC Mtg: Synthetic Aperture for High-Intensity
Boeing Associate Tech Fellow Dennis Lewis will present "Synthetic Aperture Applications for High-Intensity Radiated Fields in the Aerospace Industry" at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 11, at the IEEE EMC meeting. Lewis will discuss traditional methods of evaluating shielding effectiveness and introduce synthetic aperture scanning as a means of locating the source of undesirable signals, as well as evaluating the contributions of individual apertures to the overall shielding value. These methods can be applied to a wide variety of environments such as vehicles, buildings or enclosures. Techniques to numerically remove the effects of individual apertures using plane wave spectrum gating are also discussed. Numerically removing the effects of selected apertures and recalculating effective shielding can significantly reduce test and re-engineering time. Lewis has worked at Boeing for 25 years, and his interests include applications of reverberation chamber test techniques. Lunch is available for $8. Please RSVP indicating lunch or no lunch. Event Date: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 Event Start Time:11:30 AM Event End Time:1:00 PM
Event Location: Discovery Room - Gilruth Recreation Center
Add to Calendar
George May 281-226-8543
[top] - Sam's Club in Building 3 Café Thursday
Sam's Club will be in the Building 3 Starport Café Thursday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. to discuss membership options. Sign up for a membership and receive gift card on new memberships or renewals. Cash or check only for membership purchases. - Toastmasters Practice Holiday Humor
Preparing for the holidays? Does your checklist include improving your funny bone? Well-intended humor enhances our holiday spirits. Practice your humor and improve your leadership skills by attending and participating in Space Explorers Toastmasters (SETM). Toastmasters is a world leader in communications and leadership development. The SETM club meets every Friday in Building 30A, Room 1010, at 11:45 a.m. Jobs and Training - iOS7 Tricks and Tips for Everyone
JSC's Information Resources Directorate (IRD) and JSC Chief Technology Officer James McClellan will present two opportunities for a range of Apple users to expand their skills and knowledge. iOS7 Tricks and Tips for Everyone 10 to 11:30 a.m.: This third edition of iOS Tricks and Tips is for all NASA employees. The Apple systems engineer will teach us how to make the best use of your iPhone and iPads. This session is Wednesday, Dec. 11, in the Building 30 Auditorium, and also available on NASA TV Channels 2, 51.2, OMNI 45, IPTV 402 and 4512 (HD). For additional information, contact James McClellan via email or at x45678. - iOS7 Security Deep Dive for Developers/Security
JSC's Information Resources Directorate (IRD) and JSC Chief Technology Officer James McClellan will present opportunities for a range of Apple users to expand their skills and knowledge. iOS7 Security Deep Dive for Developers/Security 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.: NASA Security personnel and developers are invited to this in-depth technical discussion on the new features and security built into iOS7. Content is appropriate for security personnel and application developers seeking to build security into their new applications for Apple mobile platforms. This session is Wednesday, Dec. 11, in the Building 30 Auditorium, and also available on NASA TV Channels 2, 51.2, OMNI 45, IPTV 402 and 4512 (HD). For additional information, contact James McClellan via email or at x45678. - Thrift Savings Plan Training
Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) is a retirement savings plan for civilians who are employed by the U.S. government and members of the uniformed services. The TSP is one of three components of the Federal Employees Retirement System and is designed to closely resemble the dynamics of private sector 401(k) plans. What You'll Learn: This is an overview of the Federal Investment Program and covers the nuts and bolts of the TSP. Topics Covered: - The basics of the TSP
- Defined Contribution Plan
- Tax-savings features
- Investment options
- Loan program
- Withdrawal options
- Open Seasons and inter-fund transfers
Who Should Attend: Federal employees interested in learning more about the TSP. It is also open to employees covered under the older Civil Service Retirement System. Date/Time: Session 1: Jan. 10, 9:30 a.m. to noon Session 2: Jan. 10, 1 to 4 p.m. Where: Building 2 Teague Auditorium Register via SATERN: - Pre-Retirement for CSRS
Are you prepared to retire? This pre-retirement seminar is designed to help you effectively manage today's realities as you begin to explore retirement possibilities. Retirement is often looked upon as a financially based decision. Although the financial aspects are important, many other concerns need to be addressed. This seminar is designed to help effectively deal with today's realities as you begin to explore retirement possibilities. Topics covered include lifestyle planning, health maintenance, financial planning, legal affairs planning and more. Who Should Attend: Federal employees interested in learning more about the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) with five to 10 or fewer until retirement eligibility. Course Length: 16 hours Pre-Retirement for CSRS Date: Jan.6 to 7 Time: 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. CST Location: Teague Auditorium - Pre-Retirement for FERS
Are you prepared to retire? This Pre-Retirement for Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS) Seminar is designed to help you effectively manage today's realities as you begin to explore retirement possibilities. Retirement is often looked upon as a financially based decision. Although the financial aspects are important, many other concerns need to be addressed. This seminar is designed to help effectively deal with today's realities as you begin to explore retirement possibilities. Topics covered include lifestyle planning, health maintenance, financial planning, legal affairs planning and more. Who Should Attend: Federal employees interested in learning more about the FERS with five to 10 years or fewer until retirement eligibility. Course Length: 16 hours Pre-Retirement for FERS Date: Jan. 8 to 9 Time: 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. CST Location: Teague Auditorium | |
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| 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 and Human Spaceflight News
Tuesday – December 10, 2013
International Space Station Activities:
HEADLINES AND LEADS
Blue Origin takes another small step towards human spaceflight
Jeff Foust – The Space Review
The companies that comprise the entrepreneurial space, or NewSpace, industry have varying degrees of openness, but few—beyond any companies that have yet to publicly disclose their existence—are as secretive as Blue Origin. The company, founded and primarily funded by Amazon.com Jeff Bezos, has deliberately kept a low profile for more than a decade, only rarely disclosing the company's activities and plans. Radiation on Mars 'Manageable' for Manned Mission, Curiosity Rover Reveals
The risk of radiation exposure is not a show-stopper for a long-term manned mission to Mars, new results from NASA's Curiosity rover suggest.
Curiosity measures radiation at Martian surface
The first measurement of radiation at Mars' surface has implications for a human mission to the Red Planet, as well as for where Mars' missions might find traces of Martian life – if it was ever there.
Elizabeth Barber – The Christian Science Monitor
Radiation has never been kind to Mars. If life ever existed on the Red Planet, radiation might have finished it off. It might then have erased all trace of that life ever having been there. And it will now make putting humans on the planet a dangerous and difficult mission.
NASA Mars rover finds evidence of life-friendly ancient lake
Irene Klotz - Rueters
Scientists have found evidence of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars well suited to support microbial life, the researchers said Monday.
Ancient Mars Lake Could Have Supported Life, Curiosity Rover Shows
NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of an ancient Martian lake that could have supported life as we know it for long stretches — perhaps millions of years.
Curiosity findings prompt new search strategy for organics
William Harwood – CBS News
Exploring an ancient lakebed on Mars -- a now-vanished fresh-water lake that increasingly confirms the past habitability of the red planet -- NASA's Curiosity rover is looking for areas where erosion may have uncovered pristine layers in which organic compounds -- and possibly remnant traces of life -- might still be found, scientists said Monday.
NASA: Ancient Mars lake may have supported life
Alicia Chang – AP
NASA's Curiosity rover has uncovered signs of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars, which scientists say could have been a perfect spot for tiny primitive organisms to flourish if they ever existed on the red planet.
Mars crater may have supported microbial life forms
Traci Watson – USA Today
NASA's robotic rover on Mars has found signs that a vast and hospitable lake once spread over the now-desolate Martian surface, providing a potential home to past life for centuries or longer.
Ancient Martian Lake May Have Supported Life
Kenneth Chang – New York Times
About 3.5 billion years ago — around the time life is thought to have first arisen on Earth — Mars had a large freshwater lake that might well have been hospitable to life, scientists reported Monday.
NASA Curiosity rover discovers evidence of freshwater Mars lake
Joel Achenbach
NASA's steady reconnaissance of Mars with the Curiosity rover has produced another major discovery: evidence of an ancient lake — with water that could plausibly be described as drinkable — that was part of a long-standing, wet environment that could have supported simple forms of life.
NASA's ISS Robonaut 2 will soon have a pair of legs
Brittany Hillen - Slash Gear
Robots might not be at a Terminator level of sophistication, but the technology is growing rapidly, and NASA has revealed what it calls "another milestone" in humanoid space robotics: legs for the Robonaut 2, more commonly called R2. The agency's engineers are presently working on the climbing legs, which will give the robot a new degree of mobile freedom, enabling it to perform more tasks than currently possible. Clear the Barriers to Commercial Research on ISS
By SpaceNews Editor
The international space station (ISS) has been alternatively touted as a test bed for future astronaut missions to deep-space destinations and a world-class microgravity research laboratory. But with manned missions to Mars — or even a return of astronauts to the Moon — well beyond any realistic budgetary and planning horizon, the emphasis needs to be on the latter. That means, among other things, that the U.S. government, as the lead investor on station, must do everything it possibly can to encourage private-sector research aboard the outpost.
COMPLETE STORIES
Blue Origin takes another small step towards human spaceflight
Jeff Foust – The Space Review
The companies that comprise the entrepreneurial space, or NewSpace, industry have varying degrees of openness, but few—beyond any companies that have yet to publicly disclose their existence—are as secretive as Blue Origin. The company, founded and primarily funded by Amazon.com Jeff Bezos, has deliberately kept a low profile for more than a decade, only rarely disclosing the company's activities and plans. Company officials say that reputation for secrecy reflects a desire not to get too far ahead of what they're doing. "I think the reality is that we're just very quiet," Brett Alexander, director of business development and strategy at the company, said at a human spaceflight symposium in October at the US Naval Academy. "We like to talk about things after we've done them, and not before that, and hopefully you'll be hearing a lot from us in the future."
Last week, the company decided to talk about something it had recently done. In a press release and teleconference Tuesday with reporters, both rare events for the company, Blue Origin announced a successful test of an engine it developed for use on its suborbital and orbital vehicles. The company also provided some hints, but again not many details, about its future plans.
BE-3 makes a simulated flight
The milestone Blue Origin announced Tuesday was a test of the BE-3, a liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen engine the company developed. The company recently performed a "mission duty cycle" test of the engine, firing it as if it was powering the company's New Shepard suborbital vehicle on a typical flight. The engine fired at full thrust (490,000 newtons, or 110,000 pounds-force) for 145 seconds to simulate the boost phase of the flight, then shut down for four and a half minutes before firing again at less than a quarter of its boost phase thrust to simulate a powered landing.
That demonstration was the latest in a series that featured more than 160 starts of the engine and a cumulative run time of 9,100 seconds, or more than two and a half hours. Those tests started in January, Blue Origin president and program manager Rob Meyerson told reporters Tuesday, at the company's test site in West Texas. "That equates to an average about a test every two days, and on a regular basis we conducted three or four tests in a day," he said. "So we're moving at a pretty rapid pace."
The engine, designed entirely in-house at Blue Orgin, sets itself apart from other engines, particularly those that use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, because it is restartable, reusable, and deeply throttlable, Meyerson said. It makes use of a "tap off cycle" where hot gasses are tapped from the combustion chamber wall to power the turbines on the engine's turbopumps. That, he said, makes it simpler than alternative engine designs and has a "graceful shutdown mode" that is well suited for human spaceflight.
The company had earlier tested the thrust chamber of the engine at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi as part of Blue Origin's Commercial Crew Development phase 2 (CCDev-2) award from NASA, a funded Space Act Agreement the company received to mature several key technologies for a proposed future orbital crew vehicle. The latest test was done under an unfunded extension of Blue Origin's CCDev-2 award announced earlier this year, after Blue Origin elected not to seek an award in the next round of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
The test, Meyerson said, was one of three milestones in that unfunded agreement. The other two milestones, he added, are reviews of cryogenic propellant tanks for New Shepard and an interim design review of the company's orbital space vehicle, but did not disclose what progress the company made on those.
While Blue Origin elected not to continue in the program, it was pleased with how the CCDev-2 program helped the company. "That testing that was performed under CCDev-2 allowed us to accelerate this program by about a year," Meyerson said. "The partnership with NASA was extremely valuable to us. We think there was great value achieved on both sides."
NASA was also pleased with the test. "Blue Origin has made steady progress since the start of our partnership under the first Commercial Crew Development round," said Phil McAlister, NASA's director of Commercial Spaceflight Development, in a NASA press release. "We're thrilled to see another successful BE-3 engine test fire."
Future plans
Blue Origin initially intends to use the engine in the New Shepard suborbital vehicle. However, Meyerson said the company is also planning to use a derivative of the engine to power the upper stage of the company's planned orbital vehicle. This variant, called the BE-3U, would have a different nozzle than the BE-3 to account for the different engine expansion ratio at higher altitudes. Other changes to the engine are also possible, he said, since it will be expendable, rather than reusable as on the suborbital vehicle.
Meyerson didn't go into details about the design of that orbital vehicle, including the configuration of the lower stage. "There's a number of variants that we are considering. We're not providing details of the orbital vehicle at this time," he said, beyond it potentially using a cluster of engines in a reusable first stage.
The company's focus on engine development, Alexander said during a panel session at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) in New Mexico on October, was driven by a lack of available options for engines that suited their needs. "We would have much rather gone out and bought an engine off the shelf, but what we needed was low cost, highly reusable, highly operable, deep throttling for the vertical landing, and we didn't find that out there," he said. "If we did find it, it wouldn't have been at a price point that we would have liked, so we've been developing that in-house."
In the briefing with reporters, Meyerson tried to stay away from speculation about future plans at all. "We're in the development phases now, so we're not going to talk about flight schedules, pricing, or any other details like that," he said at the beginning of the teleconference. Asked later for some general timeline of activity, Meyerson said we could expect the company to start flying New Shepard "in the next several years" while the company develops an orbital vehicle in parallel. For the latter, Meyerson offered a more specific date for its first orbital flights: the "2018 timeframe."
At ISPCS, Alexander said the next vehicle in the New Shepard program would be flying "shortly," but offered no details on the timeline for those tests. He had earlier said the company planned to perform "tens, if not low hundreds of flights" on its suborbital vehicle before attempting crewed orbital flights. (The 2018 date for the first orbital flight, Meyerson said last week, would be an uncrewed mission.)
Unlike other suborbital vehicle developers, such as Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace, Blue Origin has not started selling flights for space tourists, researchers, or other customers. "We're sort of a built it first, and then sell it later organization," Alexander said at ISPCS. "But obviously we intend to be in that business within a five-year time period."
Much of the attention that Blue Origin has received has had little to do with its suborbital or orbital vehicles. The company was one of two, along with SpaceX, to submit proposals to lease Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), a former Space Shuttle pad, at Kennedy Space Center. Before NASA could award a lease, but with signs the agency was leaning towards a deal with SpaceX that would grant the company exclusive use of the pad, Blue Origin filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Blue Origin said it was instead proposing a multi-user arrangement for LC-39A that would allow it and other companies, including SpaceX, to make use of the pad as needed. "The proposal is about making fullest commercial use of LC-39A as a commercial asset, not when Blue Origin is going to fly its first vehicle," Meyerson said Tuesday. "We believe the proposal we submitted makes the fullest commercial use of the asset, and we strongly believe we have a good proposal."
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was sharply critical of Blue Origin's protest, suggesting it was an effort by United Launch Alliance (ULA), who has partnered with Blue Origin in the past on the Commercial Crew Program, to block SpaceX. Blue Origin, he told Space News, "has not yet succeeded in creating a reliable suborbital spacecraft, despite spending over 10 years in development." He added that SpaceX would be willing to accommodate Blue Origin if it did have an orbital vehicle ready to use LC-39A in the next five years, but infamously added, "I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct."
SpaceX, though, did shift its position as a result of the protest, saying it was willing to support other users for LC-39A rather than an exclusive-use lease it originally sought. A decision by the GAO on the protest is currently expected no later than this Thursday, according to the GAO website.
Whether or not Blue Origin has an orbital vehicle of some kind ready to fly in 2018, the company has adopted a long-term vision summed up in the company's Latin motto: "Gradatim Ferociter," roughly translated as "step by step, with ferocity." It has the luxury of this approach because of the support of its primary financier, Bezos. Other than the $25.7 million it received from NASA during the first two rounds of the Commercial Crew Program, the company has been funded by Bezos; Alexander said at the Naval Academy symposium in October that this accounted for "well more than 90 percent" of the company's total funds to date.
"Fundamentally, we are on a journey that is about changing spaceflight from being dangerous and expensive into something that's accessible to a broader sector of humanity," Alexander said. "We view it as a long-term endeavor, something that's 20, 30, 40 years in the making."
Radiation on Mars 'Manageable' for Manned Mission, Curiosity Rover Reveals
The risk of radiation exposure is not a show-stopper for a long-term manned mission to Mars, new results from NASA's Curiosity rover suggest.
A mission consisting of a 180-day cruise to Mars, a 500-day stay on the Red Planet and a 180-day return flight to Earth would expose astronauts to a cumulative radiation dose of about 1.01 sieverts, measurements by Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) instrument indicate.
To put that in perspective: The European Space Agency generally limits its astronauts to a total career radiation dose of 1 sievert, which is associated with a 5-percent increase in lifetime fatal cancer risk.
"It's certainly a manageable number," said RAD principal investigator Don Hassler of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a study that reports the results today (Dec. 9) in the journal Science.
A 1-sievert dose from radiation on Mars would violate NASA's current standards, which cap astronauts' excess-cancer risk at 3 percent. But those guidelines were drawn up with missions to low-Earth orbit in mind, and adjustments to accommodate trips farther afield may be in the offing, Hassler said.
"NASA is working with the National Academies' Institute of Medicine to evaluate what appropriate limits would be for a deep-space mission, such as a mission to Mars," Hassler told SPACE.com. "So that's an exciting activity." The new results represent the most complete picture yet of the radiation environment en route to Mars and on the Red Planet's surface. They incorporate data that RAD gathered during Curiosity's eight-month cruise through space and the rover's first 300 days on Mars, where it touched down in August 2012.
The RAD measurements cover two different types of energetic-particle radiation — galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), which are accelerated to incredible speeds by far-off supernova explosions, and solar energetic particles (SEPs), which are blasted into space by storms on our own sun.
RAD's data show that astronauts exploring the Martian surface would accumulate about 0.64 millisieverts of radiation per day. The dose rate is nearly three times greater during the journey to Mars, at 1.84 millisieverts per day.
But Mars' radiation environment is dynamic, so Curiosity's measurements thus far should not be viewed as the final word, Hassler stressed. For example, RAD's data have been gathered near the peak of the sun's 11-year activity cycle, a time when the GCR flux is relatively low (because solar plasma tends to scatter galactic cosmic rays).
Curiosity's radiation measurements should help NASA plan out a manned mission to Mars, which the space agency hopes to pull off by the mid-2030s, Hassler said. And they should also inform the search for signs of past or present life on the Red Planet — another top NASA priority.
For example, the new RAD results suggest that microbial life is unlikely to exist right at the Martian surface, Hassler said. But future missions may not have to drill too deeply underground to find pockets of Mars life, if it ever existed.
"These measurements do tell us that we think it could be viable to find signs of possible extant or past life as shallow as 1 meter deep," Hassler said.
The new study is one of six papers published in Science today that report new results from Curiosity. Most of the other studies present evidence that the rover has found an ancient freshwater lake that could have supported microbial life for tens of thousands, and perhaps millions, of years.
Curiosity measures radiation at Martian surface
The first measurement of radiation at Mars' surface has implications for a human mission to the Red Planet, as well as for where Mars' missions might find traces of Martian life – if it was ever there.
Elizabeth Barber – The Christian Science Monitor
Radiation has never been kind to Mars. If life ever existed on the Red Planet, radiation might have finished it off. It might then have erased all trace of that life ever having been there. And it will now make putting humans on the planet a dangerous and difficult mission.
Two new papers in the journal Science address how radiation will factor into a future manned mission to Mars and into searches for signs of life there. Both papers are published as part of a package of six articles on the Curiosity rover's most recent findings at Mars' Gale Crater.
One of the papers presents the first direct measurement of the radiation level on the Martian surface, a figure that has significant implications for NASA's proposed manned trip to Mars. Along with another paper that presents the first radiometric dating on another planet, it also proposes where future Mars missions might find traces of life on the Red Planet – if it was ever there to begin with.
"This is an important milestone," says Don Hassler, Science Program Director at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado and the lead author on the first paper.
When man goes to Mars
On Aug. 6, 2012, the Curiosity rover landed at 4.4 km MOLA (Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter) altitude in Mars' Gale Crater. The 96-mile-wide crater dates to about 3.7 to 3.5 billion years ago, either at the very end of Mars' Late Noachian or the very beginning of its Early Hesperian period, the first two of the three periods in the Martian geological time scale. At the crater's middle is Mount Sharp, and the rest of the valley is filled with features named in evocation of Earth's landscapes: Yellowknife Bay, Gillespie Lake sandstone, Sheepbed mudstone.
These are generous names, though. Scientists have known since 1964, when the Mariner 4 probe skirted Mars and sent back images of a brittle, dust-caked planet, that if the Red Planet looks like Earth, it looks like a post-apocalyptic version of it, after a giant went through and ripped the trees from the cliffs and guzzled all the water from the valleys.
Evidence suggests that Mars was once wrapped in a thick atmosphere. But, sometime during the Noachian period, it lost it. At that time, Mars, now in its peculiarly named Amazonian period, also lost its water and its warmth. Lost, too, was its robust protection against radiation.
While Earth's atmosphere protects it from most of the cosmos' constant barrage of radiation, Mars' slight one lets lots of that radiation in. Mars also lacks the radiation-deflecting magnetic field that Earth has. Scientists have long expected that Mars' sparse protection against radiation will be a major barrier to putting humans on the planet. So too will be the long travel time to and from Mars, during which astronauts will be subjected to even stronger radiation in empty space. NASA has identified assessing the radiation threat to Mars-travellers as among its top priorities before sending a manned mission to Mars sometime in the 2030s.
When the Curiosity craft launched on Nov. 11, 2011, aboard it was the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD), a device designed to monitor how much radiation the rover was exposed to during its 253-day journey to Mars and its subsequent time there.
The RAD data from Curiosity's flight to Mars was reported earlier this year in the journal Science. Based on data showing an average daily radiation dose of 1.8 thousandths of a Sievert (Sv), the paper's authors estimated that astronauts would be exposed to a dose of 0.66 Sv during a six-month, round-trip to Mars.
For comparison, the average American gets a total dose of about .003 Sv of radiation from all sources in a year. A worker responding to the 2011 Fukushima disaster was allowed to accumulate a dose of no more than .25 Sv of radiation.
The data reported in this week's paper comes from RAD's measurements on the Martian surface. For 300 Martian days, or Sols (one Martian Sol is equivalent to 24 hours 39 min), Curiosity was zapped with cosmic rays, receiving a radiation dose of about .64 thousandths of a Sievert per day, the data shows.
The team then combined the figures from the flight to Mars with those on the surface of Mars to estimate the total radiation does an astronaut would receive during NASA's template mission to Mars: 360 days travel time and 500 days surface time. That number comes to 1.01 Sieverts (Sv), or about 10 times the radiation dose an astronaut receives during a six-month mission on the ISS.
"We now have a more complete picture of what the radiation exposure might be for an astronaut on a trip to Mars," says Dr. Hassler. "Making these first ever measurements is very significant."
Radiation is a concern for good reason: a dose of one Sievert of radiation is associated with a five percent increase in a person's risk of developing fatal cancer. It is also associated with long-term damage to the eyes and lungs, as well as to the gastrointestinal system. Much is also still unknown about how it wastes the body, including its effects on the central nervous system; understanding how radiation might affect an astronaut's cognitive performance during a long-term mission is critical before such a mission is launched, NASA has said.
NASA does not put an absolute limit on the dose of radiation its astronauts can accumulate over time, but it does put a career limit on the percentage increase that it will allow its astronauts to increase their cancer risk. For astronauts in Low Earth Orbit, that limit is three percent. Depending on age and gender, that puts the radiation limit between one and four Sieverts.
The space agency has not yet determined the limit for Mars-bound astronauts. The National Academy of Medicine is reviewing the issue as both a medical and ethical one and is expected to release its recommendations in April 2014.
Meanwhile, NASA is investigating possibilities for minimizing astronauts' radiation exposure during a Mars mission, says Chris Moore, deputy director of advanced exploration systems at NASA.
"Radiation protection will be a significant challenge," says Dr. Moore.
One option is to insulate a Mars-bound spacecraft from radiation using absorbing materials like hydrogen or polyethylene, which is also used in the outer layers of the International Space Station, he says.
Still, put too much extra material on a spaceship, "and at a certain point it becomes too heavy to launch to Mars," says Moore. So, NASA is also reviewing technological possibilities for shortening the travel time to and from the Red Planet, he says. Another possibility is to configure the spaceship layout such that hydrogen-rich food and water supplies are kept in the crew's sleeping quarters, as a protection measure, he says.
Though Curiosity's measurements are a major step in understanding the radiation exposure for Mars-bound astronauts, much is still unknown about how radiation will factor into a manned mission to the Red Planet, says Moore.
That's because all of RAD's data was collected during an unusually weak solar minimum, with no big pops or spurts from the sun, he says. So, RAD registered little of the kind of cosmic radiation produced in a solar maximum's storms, called Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs). Instead, almost all the radiation it absorbed was from Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs), which tend to be stronger when SEPs are weaker, and vice versa.
Understanding when is the best time for travel to Mars will require data from a big solar storm, says Moore.
"It will probably be a while before we're able to go to Mars," he says, "and by that time we'll have learned a lot more."
Was there ever life on Mars?
Curiosity's principle goal is to find evidence that Mars once had the proper conditions to host life – not that it did, in fact, have life. But a kingpin find, nevertheless, would be to uncover evidence suggesting that life did indeed make a home out of the once Not-So-Red Planet, before its atmosphere was shredded up. That would require finding bio-signatures, or organic material that suggests life's previous presence there.
But, so far, scientists have found no such evidence. That leaves two options, says Kenneth Farley, a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology and an author on the second paper: "Either Mars never had life, or it was there, and the evidence was destroyed by cosmic rays."
Indeed, it's possible that constant, extreme radiation didn't just kill whatever life might have been on Mars, but also might have erased all trace of it ever having been there, he says. And if any suggestion of life is left at all (were life ever there), scientists will have to look in just the right spots.
In their paper, Dr. Farley and colleagues present the first radiometric dating of the Martian surface, a feat that, beyond demonstrating "that these incredibly complex calculations can be made on another planet," hints at where Mars missions should scout for bio-signatures that radiation has not yet wasted to nothing, says Farley.
The team's dating showed that the scarp ringing Gale Crater's Yellowknife Bay is being laterally eroded as a southwest-blowing wind hurls sand at the cliffs. So, if the Curiosity rover were still at Yellowknife, the best place to look for bio-signatures would be at the southwestern base of the scrap, where the rock was most recently exposed and anything inside it has not been exposed to surface radiation for long.
As Curiosity travels to Mount Sharp, the findings offer another bio-signature-hunting strategy to the rover's toolkit. At the moment, Curiosity looks for bio-signatures either by digging down into the Martian surface or sampling from recent craters, where sediments are freshly exposed. But digging is difficult, and plumbing only newly created craters is limiting, since these craters don't always have "the most interesting rocks," says Farley.
"We don't know exactly what lies ahead," says Farley, "but we will find other scraps. And we now understand, going forward, how missions on Mars might take advantage of what nature is already doing."
Is there still life on Mars?
Mars' might not have any evidence left of past life. Life might have never even been there at all. But that hasn't stopped Earthlings from asking the romantic question: could there be living Martian life?
If there is, it would have to be underground, the first paper suggests.
That's because rock cover provides shielding from the constant barrage of radiation that would over time be fatal to organisms. At one meter deep in the Martian rock, the radiation dose per year is about half what it is aboveground. At three meters deep, it is about 98 percent less than what it is at the surface (it's for that reason that Mars One, the private mission to put a human colony on Mars in the 2020s, says that its settler habitat will be buried several meters deep in Martian dirt).
Based on RAD data, the researchers estimate that life would have to be buried at least one meter underground to survive. Even there, to still be alive, microbial colonies would need mechanisms to withstand the radiation that does reach depths of a meter or more, including abilities to self-repair radiation damage. Without such adaptive abilities, even the most radioactive resistant organisms buried several meters deep would be killed off within a few million years, the researchers found.
"We know that life on Earth has adapted to pretty much every extreme environment," says Jen Eigenbrode, an astrobiologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and an author on both the papers. If this principle is applied to Mars, "perhaps life has found a way of surviving in this highly irradiated environment," she says.
Still, "it's just pure speculation at this point," she says. "We're entering an area we just don't understand."
And Curiosity's mission goal has never been to find actual life on Mars, says Dr. Eigenbrode. Instead, Curiosity is charged with furnishing a better understanding of a planet millions of miles from Earth, a planet that had in its beginnings seemed as if it might become something like Earth – wet and warm – but instead went a different course, to become a strange environment that humans don't yet understand.
"This is exploration," says Eigenbrode. "One day, we will address the life question, but I also hope both the public and scientists will embrace the journey as we approach that answer."
NASA Mars rover finds evidence of life-friendly ancient lake
Irene Klotz - Rueters
Scientists have found evidence of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars well suited to support microbial life, the researchers said Monday.
The lake, located inside Gale Crater where the rover landed in August 2012, likely covered an area 31 miles long and 3 miles wide, though its size varied over time.
Analysis of sedimentary deposits gathered by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows the lake existed for at least tens of thousands of years, and possibly longer, geologist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told reporters at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
"We've come to appreciate that is a habitable system of environments that includes the lake, the associated streams and, at times when the lake was dry, the groundwater," he said.
Analysis of clays drilled out from two rock samples in the area known as Yellowknife Bay show the freshwater lake existed at a time when other parts of Mars were dried up or dotted with shallow, acidic, salty pools ill-suited for life.
In contrast, the lake in Gale Crater could have supported a simple class of rock-eating microbes, known as chemolithoautotrophs, which on Earth are commonly found in caves and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, Grotzinger said.
Scientists also reported that the clays, which form in the presence of water, were younger than expected, a finding that expands the window of time for when Mars may have been suited for life.
Previous studies from Mars orbiters, landers and rovers have provided increasing evidence for a warmer, wetter, more Earth-like Mars in the planet's past. Ancient rocks bear telltale chemical fingerprints of past interactions with water.
The planet's surface is riddled with geologic features carved by water, such as channels, dried up riverbeds, lake deltas and other sedimentary deposits.
New related studies on how much radiation blasts the planet set new boundaries for how long any organic carbon, which so far has not been found on Mars, could have been preserved inside rocks within about 2 inches of the surface, the depth of Curiosity's drill.
But finding rock samples with relatively short exposure times should not be a problem. An age-dating technique, used for the first time on Mars, reveals that winds are sand-blasting away the rock faces at Gale Crater.
One of the mudstones at Yellowknife Bay, for example, has been exposed to the destructive effects of cosmic rays for only about 70 million years, well within the period of time to detect organics, said Don Hassler with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The Yellowknife Bay samples also showed hints of possible organics that may have been destroyed in the rover's laboratory oven due to highly oxidizing chemicals known as perchlorates, which so far seem to be ubiquitous in the Martian soil.
Scientists will continue to look for rocks that may have higher concentrations of organics or better chemical conditions for their preservation, Grotzinger said.
"A key hurdle that we need to overcome is understanding how those organics may have been preserved over time, from the time they entered the rock to the time that we actually detect them," said Curiosity scientist Jennifer Eigenbrode with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Curiosity currently is en route to a three-mile high mound of layered rock rising form the floor of Gale Crater, a formation known as Mount Sharp.
Based on the new information gleaned from the Yellowknife Bay samples, scientists are developing a new strategy to look for organics there.
Even if life never started on Mars, organic material presumably would have been deposited on the surface by crashing comets and asteroids.
Ancient Mars Lake Could Have Supported Life, Curiosity Rover Shows
NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of an ancient Martian lake that could have supported life as we know it for long stretches — perhaps millions of years.
This long and skinny freshwater lake likely existed about 3.7 billion years ago, researchers said, suggesting that habitable environments were present on Mars more recently than previously thought.
"Quite honestly, it just looks very Earth-like," said Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena. "You've got an alluvial fan, which is being fed by streams that originate in mountains, that accumulates a body of water," Grotzinger told SPACE.com. "That probably was not unlike what happened during the last glacial maximum in the Western U.S." NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence of an ancient Martian lake that could have supported life as we know it for long stretches — perhaps millions of years.
This long and skinny freshwater lake likely existed about 3.7 billion years ago, researchers said, suggesting that habitable environments were present on Mars more recently than previously thought.
"Quite honestly, it just looks very Earth-like," said Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena. "You've got an alluvial fan, which is being fed by streams that originate in mountains, that accumulates a body of water," Grotzinger told SPACE.com. "That probably was not unlike what happened during the last glacial maximum in the Western U.S." Habitable Mars
The lake once covered a small portion of the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater, which the 1-ton Curiosity rover has been exploring since touching down on the Red Planet in August 2012.
The main task of Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission is to determine whether Gale Crater could ever have supported microbial life. The rover team achieved that goal months ago, announcing in March that a spot near Curiosity's landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago. The new results, which are reported today (Dec. 9) in six separate papers in the journal Science, confirm and extend Curiosity's landmark discovery, painting a more complete picture of the Yellowknife Bay area long ago.
This picture emerged from Curiosity's analysis
of fine-grained sedimentary rocks called mudstones, which generally form in calm, still water. The rover obtained powdered samples of these rocks by drilling into Yellowknife Bay outcrops. The mudstones contain clay minerals that formed in the sediments of an ancient freshwater lake, researchers said. Curiosity also spotted some of the key chemical ingredients for life in the samples, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon.
The lake could have potentially supported a class of microbes called chemolithoautotrophs, which obtain energy by breaking down rocks and minerals. Here on Earth, chemolithoautotrophs are commonly found in habitats beyond the reach of sunlight, such as caves and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.
"It is exciting to think that billions of years ago, ancient microbial life may have existed in the lake's calm waters, converting a rich array of elements into energy," Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London, co-author of one of the new papers, said in a statement.
An icy Martian lake?
The shallow ancient lake may have been about 30 miles long by 3 miles wide (50 by 5 kilometers), Grotzinger said. Based on the thickness of the sedimentary deposits, the research team estimates that the lake existed for at least tens of thousands of years — and perhaps much longer, albeit on a possibly on-and-off basis.
Taking into account
the broader geological context, "you could wind up with an assemblage of rocks that represent streams, lakes and ancient groundwater systems — so for times when the lake might have been dry, the groundwater's still there. This could have gone on for millions or tens of millions of years," Grotzinger said. The lack of weathering on Gale Crater's rim suggests that the area was cold when the lake existed, he added, raising the possibility that a layer of ice covered the lake on a permanent or occasional basis. But such conditions wouldn't be much of a deterrent to hardy microbes.
"These are entirely viable habitable environments for chemolithoautotrophs," Grotzinger said.
Researchers still don't know if the Gale Crater lake hosted organisms of any kind; Curiosity was not designed to hunt for signs of life on Mars. But if chemolithoautotrophs did indeed dominate the lake, it would put an alien twist on a superficially familiar environment.
"You can imagine that, if life evolved on Mars and never got beyond the point of chemolithoautotrophy, then in the absence of competition from other types of microbes, these systems might have been dominated by that type of metabolic pathway," Grotzinger said. "And that's an un-Earth-like situation."
Curiosity findings prompt new search strategy for organics
William Harwood – CBS News
Exploring an ancient lakebed on Mars -- a now-vanished fresh-water lake that increasingly confirms the past habitability of the red planet -- NASA's Curiosity rover is looking for areas where erosion may have uncovered pristine layers in which organic compounds -- and possibly remnant traces of life -- might still be found, scientists said Monday.
"Really what we're doing is turning the corner from a mission that is dedicated to the search for habitable environments to a mission that is now dedicated to the search for that subset of habitable environments which also preserves organic carbon," Principal Investigator John Grotzinger told reporters Monday. "That's the step we need to take as we explore for evidence of life on Mars."
In papers published Monday in the journal Science, the Curiosity team unveiled critical new findings, including measurements of the radiation environment at Mars, which does not have an active magnetic field to shield the surface from its harmful effects.
As it turns out, cosmic rays from deep space can penetrate the upper few feet of martian rocks and soil, breaking apart organic compounds and effectively erasing evidence of past life or the materials necessary for life as it is known on Earth.
To find that evidence, scientists are looking for places along Curiosity's planned route where wind erosion over many millions of years has uncovered underlying beds in the relatively recent past, before energetic cosmic rays have had time to destroy whatever organic compounds might be present.
"Our measurements show that the organics could be preserved at a depth of one meter, even life could possibly, if it existed, survive at a depth of roughly one meter on Mars," said Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, a co-investigator with the Radiation Assessment Detector on Curiosity.
"It also shows us that as radiation penetrates into the soil ... it reaches the natural background at a depth of roughly three meters. In the top surface layers of four to five centimeters, which (Curiosity) can drill into, it would, with this radiation, reduce the preserved organics by a factor of roughly 1,000 over about 650 million years. So if you want to find organics, you need to find places where it hasn't been exposed for such a long time."
Scientists were able to date a lakebed rock Curiosity drilled into earlier by measuring how an isotope of potassium decayed into argon. The rock in question was formed 3.86 billion to 4.56 billion years ago. It was once buried under many feet of rock and soil, but the martian winds slowly eroded the upper strata, bringing it into reach of Curiosity's drill.
Ken Farley, a Curiosity researcher with the California Institute of Technology, said an analysis of the drill sample showed the erosion happened relatively recently, over the past 60 million to 100 million years, and that about three feet of strata is removed every million years or so.
The relatively recent uncovering of the lakebed clays "suggests that there will be some organic degradation, but perhaps not extensive organic degradation," Farley said. "But more importantly, we now have a model of where to look for the least cosmic ray irradiated rock we can get to. We simply drive to the downwind scarp and drill at the base of that scarp."
By drilling within three feet or so of a scarp, or ridge line, where the martian wind has uncovered lower layers, "we might get surface exposure ages, cosmic ray dosages, of only about a million years."
If so, Curiosity would have a much better chance of detecting complex organic compounds.
"Our hypothesis is that we can decrease the surface exposure age by drilling right up at those edges," Farley said. "And then we can test that hypothesis by obtaining the surface age date. That's our goal as we go forward here and we think the big step for the mission that takes us closer to the search for life on Mars is being able to reduce this risk of radiation, which is a very Mars-unique process."
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater in August 2012. Since then, it has been slowly making its way toward a towering mound of layered rock in the heart of the crater known as Mount Sharp, stopping along the way to investigate intriguing formations.
One such site is known as Yellowknife Bay, where Curiosity's power drill collected samples confirming a once-habitable environment. Scientists do not yet know the full extent of the lake they now believe existed there, but it likely stretched at least 30 miles around the base of Mount Sharp.
"Imagine something, an environment you might have had back on Earth about .... 10,000 years ago," Grotzinger said. "Cool, cold, maybe even ice available at the time. ... The size of these lakes would have been like the small finger lakes of upstate New York, something like that.
"The important thing we learned about the chemistry, with the clay minerals forming there, we have a moderate to neutral pH. Also we know from the absence of salt in the rock ... that lake didn't have a lot of dissolved salt in it. And finally, we have the kinds of chemicals and minerals that would have allowed simple micro-organisms to live in that environment."
In the absence of oxygen, such micro-organisms likely would have had to get by with a process known as chemolithotrophy, or "eating rock" as a summary in Science put it.
But finding actual fossils, or any remnants of ancient microbial life, assuming any are there to be found, will remain a major challenge.
"The key thing here is that ... if you go back into rocks that are billions of years old and ask what remnants of life there are, it is rare, rare, rare to find an actual microfossil," Grotzinger said. "It is a little bit less rare to find a large organic molecule. We call those chemofossils.
"And so, the trick is to make sure you have enough of the good minerals and as little as possible of the bad chemical compounds that will (alter) them. That's the game we're now weighing in on, in addition to quantifying radiation exposure."
NASA: Ancient Mars lake may have supported life
Alicia Chang – AP
NASA's Curiosity rover has uncovered signs of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars, which scientists say could have been a perfect spot for tiny primitive organisms to flourish if they ever existed on the red planet.
The watering hole near the Martian equator existed about 3.5 billion years ago around the time when life evolved on Earth. Scientists say the Martian lake was neither salty nor acidic, and contained life-friendly nutrients.
"This just looks like a pretty darn ordinary Earth-like lake in terms of its chemistry," said project scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology. "If you were desperate, you could have a drink of this stuff."
The lake, about the size of a small Finger Lake in upstate New York, likely was around for tens of thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of years. Even when the lake dried up, scientists said microbes could have migrated underground, and existed for potentially tens of millions of years.
It's not known whether simple life forms ever took hold on Mars and Curiosity lacks the tools to search for any fossilized microbes. It can only analyze the chemical makeup of rocks and soil.
The findings were published online Monday in the journal Science and presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
"The new results definitely reinforce the idea that past life on Mars was possible," planetary scientist David Paige at the University of California, Los Angeles said in an email.
Paige, who is not part of the Curiosity team, added: "The question of whether life existed or exists on Mars today is still open."
Present-day Mars is dusty and harsh, with no signs of water on the surface. But the red planet wasn't always a radiation-scarred frozen desert.
Early in its history, Mars was more tropical, with streams and rivers. With water plentiful, scientists think it was a place where primitive life could have thrived by feeding on rocks and minerals similar to tiny organisms on Earth that hide in caves and underwater vents.
Around 3.5 billion years ago, Mars underwent a shift and raged with volcanic activity. NASA's older rovers Spirit and Opportunity found geologic evidence that water flowed during this time, but it was highly acidic and considered too caustic for life.
Scientists thought much of the planet had been awash in acidic water until Curiosity earlier this year found signs of an old streambed near its landing site with a neutral pH.
Analyzing a sedimentary rock known as a mudstone, the nuclear-powered rover found further evidence of favorable environmental conditions — an ancient lake that was theoretically drinkable, harboring some of the key ingredients for life including carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen and phosphorus.
A roving science laboratory, Curiosity touched down in a massive depression called Gale Crater near Mars' equator last year, toting high-tech instruments to drill into rocks, forecast the weather and track radiation.
Now that the $2.5 billion mission has accomplished a main goal — finding a habitable environment in the lake — attention has turned to the hunt for elusive carbon-based organic compounds that are fundamental to all living things.
Before setting off on that search last summer, the six-wheel rover used its instruments to determine the age of a rock — the first time this has been achieved on another planet or celestial body.
Another study released Monday showed that the rock was 4.2 billion years old — not entirely surprising since observations from space suggested the bedrock in the crater was this old. Scientists also calculated the rock has been exposed on the surface — and to galactic cosmic rays — for 78 million years.
This knowledge should help the team find rocks in the foothills of Mount Sharp in the crater's center that have not been too zapped by radiation, said mission scientist Ken Farley of Caltech.
Scientists hope Curiosity will reach the mountain by next June, just a few months shy of its second landing anniversary.
Mars crater may have supported microbial life forms
Traci Watson – USA Today
NASA's robotic rover on Mars has found signs that a vast and hospitable lake once spread over the now-desolate Martian surface, providing a potential home to past life for centuries or longer.
The shallow water body was roughly the size of one of New York's Finger Lakes, though not nearly so deep. Its waters boasted low salinity, just the right acidity and all the chemicals needed to support living organisms. Other than on Earth, the lake was the most life-friendly place in the solar system, according to a study published in the journal Science and announced Monday at American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
"Is this the smoking gun that says there was life on Mars? No," says NASA soil mineralogist Douglas Ming, who took part in the new research. "Is this a smoking gun that this was a habitable environment? There's pretty good evidence for that. We have an environment that is very much … like on Earth."
Despite the difficulties of finding evidence of past life on Mars, "I've always been an optimist that we will find it someday," says astrobiologist Clark Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved with the study. "This is a wonderful step forward."
After its triumphant arrival on the Red Planet in August 2012, Curiosity trundled only a quarter-mile from its landing spot to a tantalizing depression named Yellowknife Bay. There it didn't take long for the rover's instruments to reveal an expanse of thick, fine-grained rock, the footprint of an ancient lake. Tests showed the rock, a type known as a mudstone because it's formed from mud, is similar to 10-million-year-old rocks in Southern California. This single lake probably covered tens of thousands of acres, and there were probably at least several other lakes nearby, says Caltech's John Grotzinger, project scientist for Curiosity.
Veins of mineral in the rocks show that even after the lake dried out, water still flowed across the site. That extra water could have allowed life to persist at the site long after the lake's disappearance, perhaps for tens of millions of years, according to the study in the current issue of Science. Adding to the appeal of this watery real estate, a rock sample collected by Curiosity and analyzed in the rover's on-board laboratories showed a wide array of chemicals needed for life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and others.
What Curiosity didn't find beyond a doubt were hydrocarbons, carbon-containing molecules that can serve as an energy source for life and a potential signature of life. The rover did detect hydrocarbons, but at least some of them came from solvents that leaked out of a storage container on the rover itself. The scientists think the hydrocarbon levels measured by Curiosity are too high to be accounted for just by the solvents, but they readily acknowledge they haven't closed the case.
"Most of us feel there is a good chance that there's something there," Grotzinger says. "It's just that we haven't been able to tease it out at the level of confidence we'd like."
Grotzinger and his team argue that even without hydrocarbons, the lake could've supported life, though not the little green men of popular imagination. The obvious candidates are bacteria and other microscopic creatures that make their living off chemicals rather than sunlight. Such microbes are found at Earthly hot springs on both land and the ocean floor, some living under extreme conditions that would be lethal for many other forms of life.
Other scientists find most of the new results generally convincing, though they are skeptical that Curiosity has found hydrocarbons.
The scientists' arguments that the rover found more hydrocarbons than would be expected from contamination alone are "tenuous at best," says Jeffrey Bada, an emeritus professor of marine chemistry at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, via e-mail. He says that if Curiosity really had stumbled on hydrocarbons, other kinds would've been detected, not just the few purified by the rover's chemistry set.
Others point out that living things have colonized much harsher environments on Earth than this gentle Martian lake, making it possible that microbes once called it home.
"If you give it an environment, life is going to spontaneously develop, so why not?" Johnson says. "But it's not proven, and people should realize that to actually prove it … is probably many years down the road."
Ancient Martian Lake May Have Supported Life
Kenneth Chang – New York Times
About 3.5 billion years ago — around the time life is thought to have first arisen on Earth — Mars had a large freshwater lake that might well have been hospitable to life, scientists reported Monday.
The lake lay in the same crater where NASA's Mars rover Curiosity landed last year and has been exploring ever since. It lasted for hundreds or thousands of years, and possibly much longer.
Whether any life ever appeared on Mars is not yet known, and Curiosity was not designed to answer that question. But the data coming back from the planet indicate that the possibility of life, at least in the ancient past, is at least plausible.
John P. Grotzinger, a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology who is the project scientist for the Curiosity mission, said that if certain microbes like those on present-day Earth had plopped into that ancient Martian lake, they would most likely have found a pleasant place to call home.
"The environment would have existed long enough that they could have been sustained, prospered, grown, multiplied," he said. "All the essential ingredients for life were present.
"Potentially the aqueous stream, lake, groundwater system could have existed for millions to tens of millions of years," he added. "You could easily get a lake with the area of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York."
The interpretation comes from detailed analysis of two mudstones drilled by Curiosity earlier this year. The structure, chemistry and mineralogy of the sedimentary rocks were not alien.
"The whole thing just seems extremely Earthlike," Dr. Grotzinger said.
The scientists presented their latest findings at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco and in a set of six articles published in the journal Science.
The surface of Mars today is frigid and arid, bombarded by sterilizing radiation, but after it formed and cooled with the rest of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago, it was initially a warmer and wetter place during its first billion years. Over the past decade, scientists have identified several sites on Mars that they think were once habitable.
In 2004, after NASA's rover Opportunity discovered evidence that the Martian places it was traversing had once been soaking wet, Steven W. Squyres, the mission's principal investigator, declared, "This is the kind of place that would have been suitable for life."
But that location would have been an extremely challenging environment for life to take hold — very salty and highly acidic. Later, the scientists said the soils had been soaked not so much by water as by sulfuric acid.
NASA chose the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater as Curiosity's landing site because readings from orbit identified the presence of clay minerals, which form in waters with a neutral pH. Curiosity's instruments indeed detected clays in the two mudstones, named John Klein and Cumberland.
The clays appear to have formed at the lake bottom, not swept down from the walls of Gale Crater, strengthening the case that the lake water was not acidic.
Curiosity also measured carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen and phosphorus, elements that are critical for life on Earth, as well as iron and sulfur minerals that could have served as food for microbes.
"If there were microbial organisms around, I think they would have liked that environment," said David T. Vaniman, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson and the lead author of a Science paper examining the mineralogy. On Earth, a class of such microbes known as chemolithoautotrophs live in caves, hydrothermal vents and the deep underground.
An impact, probably by an asteroid, excavated Gale Crater 3.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, and the John Klein and Cumberland mudstones formed out of sediments that subsequently accumulated in the crater. That is roughly the same age as rocks on Earth with the earliest signs of life.
"You can actually begin to line up in time what the Earth was doing and what Mars was doing," Dr. Grotzinger said. "It's kind of cool."
The Gale Crater lake was also of the same era as the sulfuric-acid-soaked rocks that Opportunity found. That suggests that as Mars dried out, conditions in different regions varied widely. "Things have just gotten more complex than we thought," Dr. Grotzinger said.
Curiously, even though the rocks formed in a lake, soluble elements like sodium and calcium had not been washed away. That suggests that the climate even then was cold and arid, just not as cold and arid as it is today — perhaps an ice-covered lake.
"What does it mean about the climate?" Dr. Vaniman said. "It's something we're all thinking about."
What has not been found yet is solid evidence for the carbon molecules known as organics that could serve as the building blocks of life. Such molecules are not always preserved in stone and are destroyed by radiation.
By measuring the abundance of certain elements, a technique that has long been used to date Earth rocks, Kenneth A. Farley, a professor of geochemistry at Caltech, was able to estimate that the sediments eroded from rocks 4.2 billion years old, give or take 350 million years, and that the rocks had been exposed at the surface for about 80 million years.
Previously, planetary scientists estimated ages by counting craters — the older a surface, the greater the number of craters. Dr. Farley's numbers fit with expectations for the Gale Crater rocks — "it's a nice demonstration this method could work," Dr. Farley said — and the dating technique could help locate rocks that have been exposed to radiation recently, raising the odds of finding organics, if they are present.
"That's a big step forward for the exploration of life on Mars," Dr. Grotzinger said. "We're now exploring for that subset of environments can preserve organic carbon."
NASA Curiosity rover discovers evidence of freshwater Mars lake
Joel Achenbach
NASA's steady reconnaissance of Mars with the Curiosity rover has produced another major discovery: evidence of an ancient lake — with water that could plausibly be described as drinkable — that was part of a long-standing, wet environment that could have supported simple forms of life.
Scientists have known that the young Mars was more Earthlike than the desert planet we see today, but this is the best evidence yet that Mars had swimming holes that stuck around for thousands or perhaps millions of years. (It would have been very chilly — bring a wet suit.)
The findings were being published Monday online by the journal Science and were discussed in San Francisco at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Scientists had announced this year that they'd found signs of an ancient, fresh-water lake within Gale Crater, but the new reports provide a much more detailed analysis, including the first scientific measurements of the age of rocks on another planet. The research suggests that Martian winds are sand-blasting rock outcroppings and creating inviting places to dig into rocks that may retain the kind of organic molecules associated with ancient microbes.
Gale Crater is in an area with rocks about 4.2 billion years old. The lake, which scientists think existed a little more than 3.5 billion years ago, was roughly the size and shape of one of New York's Finger Lakes. The freshwater lake may have come and gone, and sometimes been iced over, but the new research shows that the lake was not some momentary feature, but rather was part of a long-lasting habitable environment that included rivers and groundwater.
Previous discoveries by Mars rovers had suggested that the Red Planet once had surface and groundwater with the quality of battery acid, but the water in this lake looks much more benign.
"If we put microbes from Earth and put them in this lake on Mars, would they survive? Would they survive and thrive? And the answer is yes," said John Grotzinger, a Caltech planetary geologist who is the chief scientist of the Curiosity rover mission. He is the lead author of a paper titled "A Habitable Fluvio-Lacustrine Environment at Yellowknife Bay, Gale Crater, Mars."
"In March, we did know that we had a lake, but what we weren't sure of was how big it was and how long it lasted, and also we were not sure about the broader geological context that supports the presence of lakes coming and going for a very long time," Grotzinger said in an interview.
"This is really similar to an Earth environment," he said at the AGU news conference.
The duration of this environment matters when it comes to habitability, said Jennifer Eigenbrode, a geochemist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and a co-author of three of the new papers.
"If you have it sustained for a while, life can be there and do something and persist," she said.
The chemistry of the lake would have been congenial to organisms known as chemolithoautotrophs — mineral-eaters. Whether such organisms, which thrive on Earth in exotic environments such as caves and deep-sea hydrothermal vents, actually existed on the young Mars is a question Curiosity lacks the tools to answer.
NASA's ISS Robonaut 2 will soon have a pair of legs
Brittany Hillen - Slash Gear
Robots might not be at a Terminator level of sophistication, but the technology is growing rapidly, and NASA has revealed what it calls "another milestone" in humanoid space robotics: legs for the Robonaut 2, more commonly called R2. The agency's engineers are presently working on the climbing legs, which will give the robot a new degree of mobile freedom, enabling it to perform more tasks than currently possible. For now, the Robonaut 2 is attached to a support pillar, which you can see in the image above, giving it a degree of mobility while it is tested on the International Space Station, where it has been since early 2011. The new legs, which appear similar in design to the arms and don't so much have feet as they do forward-flexing appendages, will allow the robot to do more both inside and outside of the ISS.
The development is being funded by the space agency's Human Exploration and Operations and Space Technology mission directorates. Lending a bit of functionality akin to that of its partial namesake, the foot-like appendages have end effectors, which allow it to utilize sockets both inside and outside of the ISS, as well as handrails. The legs have a total span of 9-feet, and each leg has seven joints.
Said NASA's associate administrator for space technology in Washington Michael Gazarik: "NASA has explored with robots for more than a decade, from the stalwart rovers on Mars to R2 on the station. Our investment in robotic technology development is helping us to bolster productivity by applying robotics technology and devices to fortify and enhance individual human capabilities, performance and safety in space."
Clear the Barriers to Commercial Research on ISS
By SpaceNews Editor
The international space station (ISS) has been alternatively touted as a test bed for future astronaut missions to deep-space destinations and a world-class microgravity research laboratory. But with manned missions to Mars — or even a return of astronauts to the Moon — well beyond any realistic budgetary and planning horizon, the emphasis needs to be on the latter. That means, among other things, that the U.S. government, as the lead investor on station, must do everything it possibly can to encourage private-sector research aboard the outpost.
Unfortunately, there currently exists a commercial disincentive in the form of uncertainty over intellectual property rights to data and discoveries resulting from research aboard the station. Given the time required to develop and carry out experiments aboard the station, and the fact that the international partners have not committed to operating the platform beyond 2020, this problem — regardless of whether it's more perception than reality — must be addressed sooner rather than later. If there's one thing that discourages private-sector investment, in any activity, it is uncertainty.
Part of the problem stems from the cooperative agreement used to establish the U.S. portion of the space station as a privately managed national laboratory in accordance with the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. Such cooperative agreements typically incorporate standard language stipulating that after five years the government automatically obtains the rights to data from the resulting research and development, including the right to disseminate that information to other entities. Small companies hoping to test new plant variants or drugs aboard the space station argue that five years is not enough time to fully capitalize on their investment.
Another problem, this one for large companies, is that NASA, as a title-taking agency, automatically gets the rights to any invention created at an agency facility under a Space Act Agreement. Although companies can seek a waiver to retain exclusive rights to their inventions — NASA officials insist that such requests are routinely granted — the fact that they must go through the process with no guarantee of the outcome could give them pause.
Although opinions appear to vary on just how much of a hindrance these intellectual property rights issues pose, the government should err on the side of caution by eliminating the potential for uncertainty and confusion. NASA and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the nonprofit organization that manages and coordinates non-NASA research aboard the station, are pushing legislation that would do just that. Time is of the essence, NASA and CASIS officials say, in part because of the pending decision on whether to operate the space station beyond 2020: The outpost's demonstrated value as a commercial research platform should be factored into that decision.
Language in a Senate NASA authorization bill drafted in July would help by giving the agency administrator the authority to waive rights to any commercial inventions made in the course of research aboard the national laboratory portion of the station. It also shows that lawmakers are aware of the issue and have the inclination to do something about it.
According to some NASA experts, however, the Senate language does not adequately protect intellectual property rights for small companies, nor does it protect data. NASA is proposing alternative legislation that proponents say would provide broader protections for private-sector researchers while preserving the government's right to commercialize inventions developed using government resources.
But with Congress unlikely to pass a NASA authorization bill this year, NASA needs to find another legislative vehicle to get the measure passed.
One possibility is the Space Launch Liability Indemnification Extension Act (H.R. 3547) that passed in the House Dec. 2. The Senate, which returned from its Thanksgiving holiday recess Dec. 9, is working on similar legislation. But addition of the intellectual property rights language would complicate what otherwise is a very straightforward piece of legislation that must pass this year to extend the shield for U.S. commercial launch providers against launch damage claims filed by uninvolved third parties.
Another potential vehicle is appropriations legislation that must pass by Jan. 15 to keep the U.S. government funded beyond that date. The issue there is the strong possibility that Congress will pass another continuing resolution that keeps the government operating at prior-year funding levels and offers little room for policy-oriented provisions.
If, as seems likely, these opportunities come and go, lawmakers on the relevant committees should make every effort to get space station intellectual property rights on the agenda for next year. Hearings on the matter early in the next legislative session would be an excellent start. This is not something that can be allowed to languish for another year or two. If that happens, the opportunity to reap true commercial benefit from a unique — and very expensive — microgravity platform could be lost forever.
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