Monday, November 18, 2013

Fwd: Human Spaceflight News - November 18, 2013 and JSC Today



Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: November 18, 2013 6:58:38 AM CST
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: Human Spaceflight News - November 18, 2013 and JSC Today

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, November 18, 2013

 

 

 

   Headlines

  1. IT Labs FY14 Project Call Q&A Session 3 - Nov. 21

NASA IT Labs Fiscal Year 2014 (FY14) Project Call runs through Dec 12. Four Q&A sessions were scheduled to provide information about the project call and application process.

Q&A session 3 is scheduled from 11 a.m. to noon (CST), Thursday, Nov. 21.

JSC may attend the session at the local satellite location in Building 30, Room 2085B (The Watson Room), or via WebEx.

Meeting:

Meeting Number: 998 198 699

Meeting Password: ITLabs2014!

To join the online meeting:

Go to meeting

Audio conference:

Dial: (866) 756-6093

Passcode: 2652872

For assistance:

Go to NASA WebEx and click "Support" (left).

Go to NASA WebEx system diagnosis to confirm you have the appropriate players installed for Universal Communications Format rich media files.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Inform all meeting attendees prior to recording if you intend to record the meeting. Please note that any such recordings may be subject to discovery in the event of litigation.

Event Date: Thursday, November 21, 2013   Event Start Time:11:00 AM   Event End Time:12:00 PM
Event Location: JSC B30/2085B (The Watson Room)

Add to Calendar

JSC-IRD-Outreach x34883 https://labs.nasa.gov/SitePages/Project Call.aspx

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   Organizations/Social

  1. Home for the Holidays - Order Your Holiday Meal

Leave the cooking to us and order your Thanksgiving meal from your on-site café! We have everything you need to make your holiday meal perfect. Order your oven-roasted turkey, all the sides and dessert right here at JSC! All orders must be tuned in and paid for by Tuesday, Nov. 19. Orders may be picked up from the Building 3 café on Monday, Nov. 25; Tuesday, Nov. 26; or Wednesday, Nov. 27. Items and the order form can be found on the Starport website.

Danial Hornbuckle x30240 https://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/

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  1. Experience the Latest Fitness Trend at the Gilruth

According to the American College of Sports Medicine, a new winner has been crowned in the top fitness trends. In its debut year, High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has topped the list for 2014.

Just in time, Starport is happy to introduce Outer Space, the Gilruth's new box gym. The Outer Space features a versatile workout area that allows members to perform HIIT either on their own during open gym time or with some assistive coaching during OSFx.

Want to give it a try? For a limited time, you can experience the Outer Space for free! From Nov. 18 to 30, all open gym times and classes will be free, so you can see if it's the trend in fitness you've been looking for.

Stop by the Gilruth to check out the Outer Space and visit Starport's website to learn more.

Joseph Callahan x42769 https://starport.jsc.nasa.gov/en/facilities/gilruth-fitness-center/outer...

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  1. Practice Your Holiday Toasts With Space Explorers

Space Explorers Toastmasters (SETM) provides a friendly and supportive environment to practice communicating more effectively. To prepare for your holiday social events at work and in the community, come learn humorous and friendly conversation and leadership communications. Visit and participate in Toastmasters, a world leader in communications and leadership development. The SETM club meets every Friday in Building 30A, Room 1010, at 11:45 a.m.

Event Date: Friday, November 22, 2013   Event Start Time:11:45 AM   Event End Time:12:45 PM
Event Location: B. 30A, Rm 1010

Add to Calendar

Carolyn Jarrett x37594 http://spaceexplorers.toastmastersclubs.org/

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  1. JSC Contractor Safety & Health Forum - Dec. 3

 

Mark your calendars!

Our next JSC Contractor Safety and Health Forum will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 3, in the Gilruth Center Alamo Ballroom from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Our guest speaker for this event will be Dr. Robert Emery, vice president for Safety, Health, Environment and Risk Management at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. His presentation topic will be "Communicating Risk and Correcting Misinformation in a New Era." In addition, David Loyd, chief, Safety & Test Operations Division (JSC-NS), will be presenting "JSC Safety Metrics Snapshot for 2013."

Hope to see everyone there.

For questions, please contact Pat Farrell at 281-335-2012 or via email.

Event Date: Tuesday, December 3, 2013   Event Start Time:9:00 AM   Event End Time:10:30 AM
Event Location: Gilruth Center Alamo Ballroom

Add to Calendar

Patricia Farrell 281-335-2012

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   Jobs and Training

  1. HTC Orientation at the Gilruth Center - Dec. 4

Interested in learning how the Houston Technology Center (HTC) can help to turn your ideas and expertise into a company? Learn how by attending the HTC Orientation at the Gilruth Center on Wednesday, Dec. 4, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. This one-hour introduction will focus on how the HTC can guide you through the minefields of starting a business. You will leave HTC Orientation with a better understanding of the areas of expertise HTC offers.  

Event Date: Wednesday, December 4, 2013   Event Start Time:4:30 PM   Event End Time:5:30 PM
Event Location: Gilruth Center Coronado Room

Add to Calendar

Evelyn Boatman x48271

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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 TV: www.nasa.gov/ntv

·         UNDERWAY –  Live Interviews: Mars Atmosphere & Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) Mission

·         7 am Central (8 EST) – Replay of "The Path Toward Humans on Mars" Briefing

·         10 am Central (11 EST) – MAVEN Launch Coverage

·         12:28 pm Central (1:28 EST) – LAUNCH of MAVEN atop an Atlas V rocket (2 hour window)

·         3 pm Central (4 EST) – MAVEN Post-Launch Press Conference (~2 ½ hours post-launch)

 

KYLE NOTE: After today, the Human Spaceflight News may be distributed by others within the Public Affairs office.

 

Human Spaceflight News

Monday – November 18, 2013

 

HEADLINES AND LEADS

 

Bolden: 'I would love to be an Orion astronaut!'

 

Jason Rhian - SpaceflightInsider.com

 

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden paid a visit to NASA's Kennedy Space Center and the adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to review both NASA's next manned spacecraft, the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, as well as the space agency's next probe to journey to the Red Planet – MAVEN. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN or "MAVEN" is a $187 million spacecraft which will study the upper Martian atmosphere in an effort to better understand the processes which produced the thin Martian atmosphere we see today. Bolden's first stop was at the Operations and Checkout building (O&C) at Kennedy Space Center proper. Within is the flight test article of the Orion spacecraft which is currently set to launch atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral in September of next year. The Orion spacecraft has obviously had some work done to it since the media was introduced to spacecraft in June 2012. Bolden was joined by two other former shuttle astronauts, Robert Cabana, who is the Kennedy Space Center director and John Grunsfeld, NASA's Associate Administrator for the space agency's Science Mission Directorate.

 

SpaceX passes safety review for human spaceflight

 

Elizabeth Howell - Space Exploration Network (SEN.com)

 

After two days of meetings late last month with SpaceX -- which is best known for its Dragon cargo spacecraft -- NASA expressed satisfaction so far with the forthcoming human-rated version of the vessel and Falcon 9 rocket that will carry it to space. "The milestone is not the end of the safety discussion; it's really the beginning," stated Jon Cowart, deputy manager of the NASA Partnership Integration Team for CCP. "Because we've been doing this for so long, we all have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't, and how safety processes can be strengthened to increase our confidence in the system."

 

Inside the International Space Station control room

 

Richard Hollingham - BBC News

 

It could be the most boring reality TV show in the world, if the stakes were not so high. On a huge screen at one end of a giant room is an image of a white-walled corridor, harshly lit by strip lights and cluttered with equipment, ducts and wires. Occasionally someone drifts into view, adjusts something, and then moves out of vision. There is no plot, tension or jeopardy. However, since the picture is beamed live from the International Space Station (ISS), drama is not what the controllers on the ground are after.

 

How to prevent a 'Gravity'-like space disaster

 

Matthew Stibbe - Forbes

 

The film Gravity might be Hollywood fiction, but the Kessler Effect that sent Sandra Bullock spinning off into space is a risk faced by real astronauts. 'We did see a bunch of small impacts in various flights,' says Dr Franklin Chang Díaz, a veteran of seven spaceflights, 'and part of our daily routine on the Space Shuttle was to inspect the windows [for impact damage].' The film shows what happens when orbital debris collides and creates a chain reaction – the Kessler effect – which ends up destroying a Space Shuttle. But how realistic is it? Could the Kessler effect destroy satellites? Could it make access to low Earth orbit virtually impossible? Perhaps. And Dr Chang Díaz thinks he has a way to stop it happening.

 

President Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral six days before he was killed

Visit to launch center 6 days before his assassination impressed, likely inspired, president

 

James Dean – Florida Today

 

Kennedy Space Center as we know it was just getting off the ground when President John F. Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral for the last time, 50 years ago today. Inside the Launch Complex 37 blockhouse, scale models arranged on a table previewed what the massive Vehicle Assembly Building, launch pad 39A and Saturn V rockets would look like. There, pointing to the models and charts propped on easels, NASA leaders briefed the president on progress developing the facilities and rockets that would support moon shots by his end-of-the-decade goal.

 

Russia starts ambitious super-heavy space rocket project

 

Russia Today

 

On the 25th anniversary of the historic flight of the Soviet space shuttle Buran, Russia's Roscosmos space agency has formed a working group to prepare "within weeks" a roadmap for the revival of the Energia super-heavy booster rocket. The group led by Oleg Ostapenko, the new head of Roscosmos Federal Space Agency, is set to draw up proposals on the design of a super-heavy launch vehicle capable of delivering up to 100 tonnes of payload to the baseline orbit, former Soviet minister of general machine building, Oleg Baklanov, said on Friday. The new carrier rocket Angara is set to become the base for the ambitious project that could bring Russia back to its heyday of space exploration. It could be launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome which is now being constructed in Russia's Far East, and will replace Kazakhstan's Baikonur as Russia's main launchpad.

 

Buran, the Soviet space shuttle, flew 25 years ago

 

Stephen Clark – SpaceflightNow.com

 

 

The Soviet Union's Buran space shuttle took off Nov. 15, 1988, on an unmanned twice-around-the-world test flight that marked the pinnacle of Cold War space development behind the Iron Curtain, and its legacy still powers space programs worldwide. The sleek-looking white space plane, bearing a remarkable outward resemblance of NASA's space shuttle, only flew once and never took off with cosmonauts on-board. The flight began at dawn from the sprawling Baikonur Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan. In 1988, the rocket base was still largely secret and was located on Soviet territory.

 

A bright future in space

Space Coast again at center of human space exploration

 

Lynda Weatherman & Frank DiBello - Florida Today (Opinion)

 

A strong national program of human space exploration is an essential part of the Space Coast economy and a robust future at Kennedy Space Center. The good news for Brevard County, KSC and all of Florida is that America is developing the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS), two programs that are helping to foster a new era of technological development and discovery in space with capabilities to support human missions to the moon, asteroids and beyond. Even before the retirement of the shuttle program, state and local forethought enabled the rapid renovation of key KSC facilities such as the Operations & Checkout (O&C) building to develop this structure into a modern, state-of-the-art spacecraft manufacturing operation.

 

MEANWHILE, HEADING TO MARS…

 

NASA Mars probe cleared for launch Monday

 

William Harwood – CBS News

 

NASA's next Mars probe is poised for launch Monday, weather permitting, to kick off a $671 million mission to find out why a good portion of the red planet's atmosphere leaked away ages ago in an extreme case of climate change that turned a once wet, once hospitable world into the dry, frigid wasteland it is today. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution -- MAVEN -- spacecraft, perched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, is scheduled for takeoff from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 1:28 p.m. EST (GMT-5) Monday to begin a 10-month voyage to Mars for at least a year of science observations using a suite of sophisticated instruments. "After all these years we're just a few days away from going to Mars," said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're poised to launch on day one of what we submitted as our final proposal five years ago."

 

NASA launching robotic explorer to Mars

 

Marcia Dunn - Associated Press

 

The Maven spacecraft was scheduled to blast off aboard an unmanned Atlas V rocket Monday afternoon. NASA is sending Maven to Mars to study its upper atmosphere. Scientists want to know why Mars went from being warm and wet during its first billion years, to the cold and dry place it is today. The early Martian atmosphere was thick enough to hold water and possibly support microbial life. But much of that atmosphere may have been lost to space, eroded by the sun.

 

Mars orbiter aims to crack mystery of planet's lost water

 

Irene Klotz - Reuters

 

Scientists have no doubts that oceans and rivers once pooled on the surface of Mars, but what happened to all that water is a long-standing mystery. The prime suspect is the sun, which has been peeling away the planet's atmosphere, molecule by molecule, for billions of years. Exactly how that happens is the goal of NASA's new Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, which is scheduled for launch at 1:28 p.m. EST/1828 GMT on Monday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

 

Maven Ready For Launch To Mars

 

Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week

 

Weather remained the main hurdle Sunday for an on-time launch of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) mission, an orbiter designed to answer the question "where did the water go" on the Red Planet. A two-hour launch widow opens at 1:28 p.m. EST Monday, raising hope that expected cloud cover will clear enough during that time for the mission to get underway atop its Atlas V401 launch vehicle. Forecasters predicted a 40% change of a weather scrub on Monday, increasing to 60% on Tuesday and Wednesday when upper level winds were expected to complicate the picture.

 

Thrift pays for extra science by NASA's MAVEN mission

 

Stephen Clark - SpaceflightNow.com

 

Citing cost-conscious caution in the early days of the development of NASA's MAVEN mission, scientists say the Mars probe has enough leftover funds to bankroll extra researchers on the MAVEN science team and enhance data analysis models to get the most out of the spacecraft's survey of the Martian atmosphere. Managers say the MAVEN is on track to come in under its $671 million budget, and NASA had enough confidence in the project's accounting figures to approve the elimination of some of the mission's reserves, which serve as an emergency fund in case engineers run into unexpected trouble.

 

Orbiter scheduled to begin trek to Mars today

MAVEN will study Red Planet's upper crust

 

James Dean - Florida Today

 

Water is believed to have flowed through rivers and lakes on ancient Mars, supported by a thicker, warmer atmosphere. Microbial life might have flourished in that climate more than 3.5 billion years ago. But today the Red Planet is a cold, dry desert. "Why do we appear to have had a climate on Mars that could have supported life at the surface early on, and we don't today?" asked Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the lead scientist for NASA's MAVEN mission. "Something fundamentally changed, and we want to understand what those changes were."

 

Developing a Fax Machine to Copy Life on Mars

 

Andrew Pollack – New York Times

 

J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist, is looking for a new world to conquer — Mars. He wants to detect life on Mars and bring it to Earth using a device called a digital biological converter, or biological teleporter. Although the idea conjures up "Star Trek," the analogy is not exact. The transporter on that program actually moves Captain Kirk from one location to another. Dr. Venter's machine would merely create a copy of an organism from a distant location — more like a biological fax machine. Still, Dr. Venter, known for his early sequencing of the human genome and for his bold proclamations, predicts the biological converter will be his next innovation and will be useful on Earth well before it could ever be deployed on the red planet. The idea behind it, not original to him, is that the genetic code that governs life can be stored in a computer and transmitted just like any other information.

__________

 

COMPLETE STORIES

 

Bolden: 'I would love to be an Orion astronaut!'

 

Jason Rhian - SpaceflightInsider.com

 

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden paid a visit to NASA's Kennedy Space Center and the adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to review both NASA's next manned spacecraft, the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, as well as the space agency's next probe to journey to the Red Planet – MAVEN. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN or "MAVEN" is a $187 million spacecraft which will study the upper Martian atmosphere in an effort to better understand the processes which produced the thin Martian atmosphere we see today.

 

Bolden's first stop was at the Operations and Checkout building (O&C) at Kennedy Space Center proper. Within is the flight test article of the Orion spacecraft which is currently set to launch atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral in September of next year.

 

The Orion spacecraft has obviously had some work done to it since the media was introduced to spacecraft in June 2012. Bolden was joined by two other former shuttle astronauts, Robert Cabana, who is the Kennedy Space Center director and John Grunsfeld, NASA's Associate Administrator for the space agency's Science Mission Directorate.

 

This iteration of Orion will be sent to orbit atop a ULA Delta IV Heavy rocket in the fall of 2014. The spacecraft will fly unmanned and be, in essence, very similar to the historic Apollo 4 flight. The Orion spacecraft will travel out 3,600 miles, about 14 times further out than the International Space Station currently orbits. It will conduct two orbits and then be directed to reenter Earth's atmosphere. Bolden expressed how he viewed the spacecraft simply and succinctly stating:

 

"I would love to be an Orion astronaut," he lamented that this was unlikely to happen.

 

Those that have had the opportunity to speak with the current NASA administrator know him as an emotional person, who expresses his feelings readily when speaking. Today's event were no different. Bolden's voice began to crack when he mentioned the passing of M. Scott Carpenter, one of the original Mercury astronauts. Carpenter passed away last month. Bolden mentioned that he had gone inside the Orion spacecraft he now stood in front of.

 

"I really can't compare this to my experiences on shuttle. This is a spacecraft tasked with exploration and it has a different role than shuttle did," Bolden said as he turned to his two fellow astronauts. "I think both Bob and John would also offer different views than the ones I had as Bob (Cabana) is a former test pilot and John (Grunsfeld) was inside the Hubble Space Telescope. I can say that it is an impressive vehicle and we are all very proud of it."

 

This will be a crucial test, one of the primary ones for the EFT-1 mission, which will test out the spacecraft's heat shield. The Orion conducting this mission will return at a blistering 20,000 miles per hour – the ultimate test of the system at the base of the craft which will protect the crew during reentry.

 

The next stop in Bolden's tour was Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41. This is where the United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket is poised to launch MAVEN to its Martian destination. Flanked again by Grunsfeld as well as the Vice-President of ULA's Atlas and Delta programs, Jim Sponnick and MAVEN's Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky.

 

MAVEN is currently scheduled to launch at 1:28 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 18. The spacecraft has a two-hour launch window in which to get off the pad and on its way. Weather conditions are the only current wild card which could delay the launch. The unpredictable Florida weather has seen a number of fronts roll in and out in recent days. Current conditions at the pad are mostly cloud-free skies and light winds.

 

SpaceX passes safety review for human spaceflight

 

Elizabeth Howell - Space Exploration Network (SEN.com)

 

After two days of meetings late last month with SpaceX -- which is best known for its Dragon cargo spacecraft -- NASA expressed satisfaction so far with the forthcoming human-rated version of the vessel and Falcon 9 rocket that will carry it to space.

 

"The milestone is not the end of the safety discussion; it's really the beginning," stated Jon Cowart, deputy manager of the NASA Partnership Integration Team for CCP.

 

"Because we've been doing this for so long, we all have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't, and how safety processes can be strengthened to increase our confidence in the system."

 

SpaceX was a pioneer in cargo transporation to the International Space Station, as its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial vehicle to dock with the orbiting complex in May 2012, and started regular service to the station in October 2012. Another US company, Orbital Sciences, recently became the second commercial operator with a successful test flight.

 

While all of the Dragon spacecraft made it to station, there have been some issues along the way. SpaceX's October 2012 flight put a satellite in too low of an orbit, for example, when one of the nine Dragon rocket engines shut off early. Also, a thruster problem on a March 2013 flight delayed delivery of cargo to the space station. SpaceX's hard-earned space-experience, nevertheless, is surely coming into play as the California-based company develops its human-rated version of Dragon for NASA.

 

SpaceX is one of three companies currently receiving funding under NASA's Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative to allow humans to take off from American soil again. The number of funded firms could drop if the fiscal 2014 budget for NASA contains less money for CCiCap than the agency hopes, providing a spur for SpaceX to do well in the latter stages of Dragon's development.

 

The company so far has finished nine of the 15 milestones under CCiCap, and now projects the process will finish in the third quarter of 2014. Some of SpaceX's major work next year includes testing the launch abort system at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. One test (in Q2 2014) will do a simulated abort before a launch, while the second (in Q3 2014) will see a Dragon physically separate from the Falcon 9 booster in mid-air before parachuting to the Atlantic Ocean.

 

"We greatly appreciate NASA's support and feedback throughout this process," said Garrett Reisman, commercial crew project manager at SpaceX and a former astronaut. "Together we are taking all the necessary steps to make Dragon the safest, most reliable spacecraft ever flown."

 

On top of its commercial cargo and crew programs, SpaceX has been working on developing reusable rockets. It flew several flights of a Falcon 9 test rig, codenamed Grasshopper, to demonstrate the feasibility of a rocket that could fly itself back to the pad. It is hoped that developing reusable rockets will cut down on launch costs, allowing SpaceX to stay competitive in the global launch services market.

 

SpaceX founder Elon Musk is well-known for his desires to head to Mars. In 2012, he said his company would be looking to develop a manned mission in the next 10 to 15 years. One of his more famous quotes on this topic: "I would like to die on Mars; just not on impact."

 

Inside the International Space Station control room

 

Richard Hollingham - BBC News

 

It could be the most boring reality TV show in the world, if the stakes were not so high. On a huge screen at one end of a giant room is an image of a white-walled corridor, harshly lit by strip lights and cluttered with equipment, ducts and wires. Occasionally someone drifts into view, adjusts something, and then moves out of vision. There is no plot, tension or jeopardy. However, since the picture is beamed live from the International Space Station (ISS), drama is not what the controllers on the ground are after.

 

"The crew has just had lunch, it's a routine day with not a lot of activity going on, which is good," explains ground control officer Bill Foster, as we sit in the viewing gallery overlooking the ISS mission control room in Houston, Texas. In front of us, some 20 people sit behind consoles surrounded by banks of computer screens displaying a mass of numbers, graphs and tables.

 

Foster's role is to coordinate control room and communications systems to make sure everything is working smoothly, but he has been allowed a break to chat to me. He points out the blank middle section of one of the large screens at the front of the room. "If anything pops up there, the computers on board the station have determined that something's not working right and it'll come up as either a black, yellow or red warning," he says. "Red is bad."

 

This room has been staffed continuously, around the clock, since the launch of the first sections of the ISS in 1998. It sits at the heart of the mission's operations and oversees astronauts' daily routines regardless of events on Earth. "We have to make sure they're healthy, they're safe, they have a sound platform to do the work we've sent them up there to do," says Foster. "You see the people here, that's just the tip of the iceberg of what's happening."

 

Around the world hundreds of other people are also working to support the mission. Even on a routine day, in other rooms at the space centre, mission controllers are planning station procedures weeks and months ahead. At the ISS mission control in Moscow, staff are overseeing the Russian segment of the space station and scheduling Soyuz supply missions. The work of any European astronauts and the Japanese space laboratory is being coordinated by others in Germany and Japan. Routines for the station's robotic arms are being developed by engineers in Canada.

 

Deadly debris

 

Simply keeping the ISS in orbit is a challenge. Even at around 400 kilometres above Earth, there are residual traces of atmospheric particles that act as a drag on the station's vast structure. "If left alone the station would eventually come back into the atmosphere over a period of months," says Foster. "We've got a trajectory officer who's watching that and designing manoeuvres when we need to add some thrust."

 

The Trajectory Operations Officer (known as TOPO) is also responsible for ensuring that the station dodges fast moving pieces of space junk that could rip a hole in the side of the orbiting lab. The procedure involved is referred to as a Debris Avoidance Manoeuvre, or DAM – an appropriate acronym as it sometimes turns out.

 

"We were relying on the Russian thrusters to move us out of the way," recalls Foster of an incident in the last 12 months. "Half of the [six] Russian thrusters didn't fire and we ended up not going into the orbit we were expecting. It was several hours before we knew we were clear."

 

"It was an interesting shift to work on," he adds dryly.

 

Despite the international nature of the ISS, if something goes wrong the buck stops in this room. Specifically, it stops at a desk in the middle of the room marked Flight Director. As we watch from the viewing gallery, the man currently occupying this chair is leaning back with his hands behind his head looking remarkably relaxed.

 

Although "Flight" is ultimately in charge, those with this nickname are not normally allowed to talk to the astronauts in orbit. That responsibility rests with the Capcom – or Capsule Communicator – a job title with its origins in the earliest days of human space exploration when astronauts took short flights in tiny metal capsules. The Capcom acts as a single point of contact to and from the ground to eliminate any chance of confusion, particularly in emergencies.

 

Communications to and from space are possible thanks to a dedicated network of satellites. These Tracking and Data Relay Satellites sit in a geostationary orbit, high above the ISS, and allow almost continuous communications between the station and the ground.

 

Although watching activity inside the space station may be tedious, live pictures from a camera on the outside of the station – displayed on another one of the giant screens at the front of the room – are altogether more interesting. As we chat, Foster points out that the station is orbiting almost directly above us, its path taking it towards the Gulf of Mexico. We watch as it passes down the US east coast, the land obscured by streaks of white cloud.

 

"It's one of the nice things about this job," he says. "If we're coming up over the United States at night, they'll pan and tilt the camera to catch some of the cities on the ground and we'll 'ooh and ahh' over the lights."

 

Things are about to get busy. But before Foster returns to his console to work on an operation to move a robotic arm on the outside of the station, I ask him whether he would rather be up in space. He doesn't hesitate to reply.

 

"The thing I'd like to do most is be in space" he exclaims. "The nice thing about the people in this room is we're all agreed that we have the second best job in the world."

 

How to prevent a 'Gravity'-like space disaster

 

Matthew Stibbe - Forbes

 

The film Gravity might be Hollywood fiction, but the Kessler Effect that sent Sandra Bullock spinning off into space is a risk faced by real astronauts.

 

'We did see a bunch of small impacts in various flights,' says Dr Franklin Chang Díaz, a veteran of seven spaceflights, 'and part of our daily routine on the Space Shuttle was to inspect the windows [for impact damage].'

 

The film shows what happens when orbital debris collides and creates a chain reaction – the Kessler effect – which ends up destroying a Space Shuttle.

 

But how realistic is it? Could the Kessler effect destroy satellites? Could it make access to low Earth orbit virtually impossible? Perhaps. And Dr Chang Díaz thinks he has a way to stop it happening.

 

Space is not empty

 

While you might think that 'space', by name as by nature, is mostly emptiness, the Earth is surrounded by orbiting space debris. There are fragments of rockets, nuts and bolts, flecks of paint, defunct satellites and even astronauts' tools flying around our planet at high speed.

 

If a large enough piece hits an astronaut, satellite or vehicle, it could be catastrophic. But there is a greater risk – a cascade effect where one collision creates more high-velocity fragments which, in turn, trigger a chain reaction with catastrophic human and economic consequences.

 

Chain reaction

 

It's not so implausible. The Chinese destroyed one of their own satellites in an anti-satellite missile test, creating a huge increase in orbital debris. But there have been other collisions. Recently an old soviet satellite hit a small Ecuadorian satellite. A few years ago, another old soviet satellite hit an Iridium satellite.

 

If the Kessler Effect actually happened the debris could knock out low-orbiting satellites, including weather and communication satellites as well as the Department of Defense's polar-orbiting spy satellites. The resulting debris field could also render satellites in geostationary orbit unusable. And forget about launching people to the Moon or Mars . They won't be able to make it safely through the debris field.

 

Destroying our orbital infrastructure would have huge economic consequences. No GPS, lousy weather forecasts, reduced internet and phone connectivity, especially in remote areas. It's a scenario only a Bond villain would wish for.

 

Orbital cleaners

 

The obvious answer is to try to de-orbit the most threatening pieces of debris before they get hit. A space tug could rendezvous, capture them and give them a shove so that they enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up.

 

However, conventional chemical rockets are woefully inefficient for the task. Each piece of debris would require its own space tug and its own launcher because conventional rockets use a lot of fuel.

 

Dr Chang Díaz is developing an alternative. Using the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) engine that his company, Ad Astra, has developed, a single mission could deorbit up to 19 eight-ton Zenit Rocket spent upper stages drifting in different orbits. About the size of a school bus, these are some of the largest debris objects currently being tracked.

 

VASIMR to the rescue

 

As Newton said 'every action has an equal and opposite reaction.' So rocket engines work by combusting fuel and shooting it out of a nozzle at high speed. The equal and opposite reaction is an accelerating spaceship. Conventional rocket motors expel a lot of mass at a relatively low speed so they have to carry a lot of fuel.

 

VASIMR is different. It uses electricity to accelerate a small amount of propellant to a very high speed and it can sustain this process for much longer. Because it gets its electricity from solar panels, it only needs a small propellant mass. This is why it works so well for the space tug mission and why NASA is planning to test a version of the motor on the International Space Station in 2016.

 

It's simple economics. It costs about $30,000 to launch one kilogram to low earth orbit. So when you re-boost the ISS with a chemical rocket you have to launch around 7000 kg of fuel at a cost of about $210m. VASIMR will do the same job with about 300kg of Argon gas – it's an order of magnitude cheaper.

 

Ready for launch

 

Ad Astra's rocket science is not science fiction. It's a practical engineering solution. The company has already tested a 200 kW version of the engine in a vacuum chamber in Houston and designed the engine it plans to launch to the Space Station. NASA has put the design through a rigorous preliminary design review.

 

'20 years ago, space was the realm of governments,' says Dr Chang Díaz, 'but it's becoming a place of business, a place of work.' Today, space is about bucks, not Buck Rogers and the economic consequences of losing access to space mean that dangers like the Kessler effect cannot be ignored. Despite the drama and the heroics in Gravity, the solution lies in Houston, not Hollywood.

 

President Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral six days before he was killed

Visit to launch center 6 days before his assassination impressed, likely inspired, president

 

James Dean – Florida Today

 

Kennedy Space Center as we know it was just getting off the ground when President John F. Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral for the last time, 50 years ago today.

 

Inside the Launch Complex 37 blockhouse, scale models arranged on a table previewed what the massive Vehicle Assembly Building, launch pad 39A and Saturn V rockets would look like.

 

There, pointing to the models and charts propped on easels, NASA leaders briefed the president on progress developing the facilities and rockets that would support moon shots by his end-of-the-decade goal.

 

Kennedy appears in a picture to be listening intently, one hand held to his chin.

 

The Apollo program's enormous cost — NASA's total budget had jumped from $500 million in 1960 to $3.7 billion in 1963 — increasingly was under attack as Kennedy prepared to campaign for re-election.

 

Kennedy himself had begun to express some doubts privately, had recently proposed cooperating on moon missions with the Soviet Union and was awaiting the results of a high-level review of the nation's military and civil space programs.

 

"So this was Kennedy preparing to make a decision on whether to continue with the Apollo program or not," said historian John Logsdon, author of "John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon." "And I think this visit rekindled his enthusiasm for the program."

 

That enthusiasm was tragically short-lived: six days later he was gunned down in Dallas.

 

Like the nation, NASA's Launch Operations Center, which within a week would be renamed in Kennedy's honor, was consumed with shock and sorrow, remembers Jack King, then NASA's local director of public information.

 

"It's something I remember and it's very close to my heart, to have him here just a week before he went to Dallas," said King, of Cocoa Beach.

 

On Nov. 16, 1963, the president flew up from his family home in Palm Beach and landed on the skid strip of what is now Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

 

At Launch Complex 37, astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper led off with an update on the Gemini program. George Mueller, the associate administrator for manned spaceflight, followed with an Apollo progress report.

 

Kennedy then moved to a nearby pad where a Saturn I rocket was being prepared for launch, worrying his Secret Service detail by walking beneath the main engines for an up-close look.

 

A famous image shows Kennedy standing with legendary rocket scientist Wernher von Braun near a model of the rocket and pointing up to the real thing.

 

Kennedy considered it extremely important — and instructed NASA officials to emphasize to the press — that the million-pound thrust booster would for the first time exceed the Soviets' lifting capability.

 

Boarding a helicopter, he flew over Merritt Island, where pilings forming the Vehicle Assembly Building's foundation poked out of the ground.

 

The helicopter whisked the president to a Navy ship 30 miles out at sea, from which he watched a Polaris missile launched from the nuclear submarine Andrew Jackson. Returning to shore, his tour concluded.

 

Kennedy was impressed by what he saw.

 

Robert Seamans, a NASA associate administrator who served as a guide during the visit, later said the president may have grasped for the first time the dimensions of the projects he had approved.

 

"He saw the enormous magnitude of this undertaking, which he probably didn't understand previously," said historian Roger Launius of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. "But when he sees a model of the VAB and then talking about how big it's going to be, when he sees models of the Saturn V and the real-life Saturn I — when he sees all that stuff, he really sees how big and significant and expensive this thing is."

 

Given his death days later, it's impossible to say the visit impacted Kennedy's continued support of the program, "but it probably would have," said Logsdon.

 

"This when it all came together for Kennedy in terms of doing Apollo," he said.

 

Today, NASA and Kennedy Space Center are trying to "right-size" the spaceport for an entirely different human spaceflight program, one lacking a space race to drive national interest and the big budgets that made Apollo possible.

 

KSC now has no use for most of the Vehicle Assembly Building and the launch pad from which the moon landings embarked.

 

But the image of Kennedy during his final visit here, seeing what was possible at this emerging spaceport, still resonates with those charting the agency's new direction.

 

"That's where we still are, is the art of the possible," said Trey Carlson, who is leading KSC's development of a new master plan. "We are going through the time right now where we could completely change the landscape of how things are out here."

 

NASA is developing a Saturn V-class rocket for occasional deep space missions, and hopes a variety of commercial launchers make use of the center's excess capacity.

 

For those who were here as the race to the moon took off, the anniversary of Kennedy's final visit conjures feelings of sadness at what followed and pride at what was ultimately accomplished.

 

"I realized the practical and political values of his supporting the space program at the time and giving us that mandate (to go to the moon)," said King.

 

"But I like to look at it a little more inspirationally, and say that he gave us a part of his Camelot. Because that was ours, all of us who worked on the Apollo program. We had our own Camelot, thanks to him."

 

Russia starts ambitious super-heavy space rocket project

 

Russia Today

 

On the 25th anniversary of the historic flight of the Soviet space shuttle Buran, Russia's Roscosmos space agency has formed a working group to prepare "within weeks" a roadmap for the revival of the Energia super-heavy booster rocket.

 

The group led by Oleg Ostapenko, the new head of Roscosmos Federal Space Agency, is set to draw up proposals on the design of a super-heavy launch vehicle capable of delivering up to 100 tonnes of payload to the baseline orbit, former Soviet minister of general machine building, Oleg Baklanov, said on Friday.

 

"You have assumed the responsibility and dared to head the group, which is supposed to find an answer to the question how we can regain the position we demonstrated to the world with the launch of a 100-tonne spacecraft [Buran in 1988] within a few weeks," the ex-minister told Ostapenko at the event dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the flight of the Buran shuttle spacecraft.

 

The new carrier rocket Angara is set to become the base for the ambitious project that could bring Russia back to its heyday of space exploration. It could be launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome which is now being constructed in Russia's Far East, and will replace Kazakhstan's Baikonur as Russia's main launchpad.

 

The 1988 launch of the Energia super-heavy rocket carrying the Buran space shuttle proved the rocket was capable of delivering 100 tonnes into orbit. That was five times more than the Proton-M rocket with a 20-tonne payload, thus making it the most powerful Soviet/Russian booster rocket ever developed.

 

As the International Space Station is scheduled to be taken out of service around 2020, ex-minister Baklanov explained that such a powerful rocket would allow the construction of a new orbital station "larger in its weight and dimensions." Also, a booster similar to the Soviet Energia would be indispensable for "exploring outer space in a wise manner, working in shifts on Mars, the Moon and so on," he added.

 

At the same media conference, president of the Energia Rocket and Space Corporation Vitaly Lopota announced that Russia will soon need super-heavy rockets to create a shield against possible future space weapons - which means deploying into orbit massive communications satellites and electronic warfare platforms.

 

'Nothing better has been created'

 

On the 25th anniversary of the Buran flight, Ostapenko acknowledged that the Soviet Union's achievements in space exploration remain an example for today's research.

 

"Human ingenuity created the Energia-Buran system 25 years ago," Ostapenko told the audience. "I am confident that events comparable by their scale are in store for us," he said.

 

In his speech, ex-minister Baklanov claimed that "nothing new has been designed" in the 25 years which have passed since the creation of the Energia-Buran system. He warned that "a point of no return is very close," and said there are only years left to recuperate the space industry to the previous level and keep the groundwork.

 

"We have a colossal amount of work to do," Ostapenko said, pointing out that only the experience of previous generations of scientists could ensure success.

 

"Our country has got huge potential; all we need to do is let the experienced professionals do their job the best way to ensure their self-actualization. I know we can do it. We've got strong support from the government, we've got thorough understanding of the tasks lying ahead," Ostapenko said.

 

Comparable to the US Space Shuttle, Buran completed only one unmanned spaceflight in 1988, as the Buran program was scrapped in 1993 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and lack of funding.

 

Soviet shuttle ahead of its time

 

The Soviet Union's Energia/Buran exceeded the American space shuttle program by practically all capabilities, according to a report prepared by experts of the All-Russian Research Institute of Aviation Materials. The analysis is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of Buran's only performed launch into space.

 

Buran could stay in orbit for 30 days, while the American shuttle had a 15-day time limit. It could deliver into orbit 30 tonnes of cargo, compared to the US shuttle's 24 tonnes of cargo. It could carry a crew of 10 cosmonauts, while the American shuttle could carry seven astronauts. Preparation for the Energia/Buran launch at Baikonur Cosmodrome only took 15 days. However, it took one month of preparations before the US shuttle was launched from Cape Canaveral.

 

The Energia rocket booster could be used to launch various payloads into orbit, whereas the American shuttle's booster was one-task. A year and a half before the Buran launch, Energia was launched with a full-scale mock-up of the Skif-DM orbital combat laser platform weighing 77 tonnes, measuring 37 meters long, and over four meters in diameter. Though the mock-up failed to reach the desired orbit and fell into the Pacific, the Energia booster did its job fine, delivering the huge space platform into intermediate orbit, 110 kilometers above the earth's surface.

 

But the most important difference from the American model was that the Soviet spaceship could perform the flight and landing in totally automatic mode, which it brilliantly demonstrated on November 15, 1988.

 

Buran's American counterpart used to land with switched-off engines, meaning it could make only one landing attempt. The Soviet spacecraft could take several tries if needed.

 

When Buran approached Baikonur Cosmodrome and started landing in 1988, its sensors registered too strong side winds and the robotic system sent the huge machine for another rectangular traffic pattern approach, successfully landing the spacecraft on a second try.

 

The Buran shuttle was designed to perform 100 flights to space, while its engines were ready to do 66 flights without replacement. During its flight, it lost just eight of its unique thermal-insulation tiles out of 38,800.

 

The Energia/Buran program, which cost 16.5 billion Soviet rubles, lasted 18 years and united over 1,200 industrial sites throughout the Soviet Union.

 

Thirty-nine principally new materials and around 230 absolutely new technologies were developed during Buran's creation. Most of them are actively used in Russia's aeronautical and space industries today.

 

But the most important difference from the American model was that the Soviet spaceship could perform the flight and landing in totally automatic mode, which it brilliantly demonstrated on November 15, 1988.

 

Buran's American counterpart used to land with switched-off engines, meaning it could make only one landing attempt. The Soviet spacecraft could take several tries if needed.

 

When Buran approached Baikonur Cosmodrome and started landing in 1988, its sensors registered too strong side winds and the robotic system sent the huge machine for another rectangular traffic pattern approach, successfully landing the spacecraft on a second try.

 

The Buran shuttle was designed to perform 100 flights to space, while its engines were ready to do 66 flights without replacement. During its flight, it lost just eight of its unique thermal-insulation tiles out of 38,800.

 

The Energia/Buran program, which cost 16.5 billion Soviet rubles, lasted 18 years and united over 1,200 industrial sites throughout the Soviet Union.

 

Thirty-nine principally new materials and around 230 absolutely new technologies were developed during Buran's creation. Most of them are actively used in Russia's aeronautical and space industries today.

 

Buran, the Soviet space shuttle, flew 25 years ago

 

Stephen Clark – SpaceflightNow.com

 

 

The Soviet Union's Buran space shuttle took off Nov. 15, 1988, on an unmanned twice-around-the-world test flight that marked the pinnacle of Cold War space development behind the Iron Curtain, and its legacy still powers space programs worldwide.

 

The sleek-looking white space plane, bearing a remarkable outward resemblance of NASA's space shuttle, only flew once and never took off with cosmonauts on-board.

 

The flight began at dawn from the sprawling Baikonur Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan. In 1988, the rocket base was still largely secret and was located on Soviet territory.

 

About the same size as a space shuttle orbiter, the Buran blasted off attached to the massive Energia booster, one of the most powerful rockets ever built. According to RSC Energia, the launcher's state-owned contractor, the Energia rocket could put 100 tons of payload into low Earth orbit and send 32 tons of equipment to the moon.

 

One of the major differences between Buran and NASA's space shuttle was the Soviet version did not use solid rocket boosters. The Energia rocket blasted off with the help of four strap-on boosters with kerosene-fueled RD-170 engines, derivatives of which still fly today on the Ukrainian Zenit and are exported to the United States to power the first stages of Atlas 5 rockets.

 

The RD-170 engine and its still-flying cousins are built by Russian engine-maker NPO Energomash.

 

South Korea's first space launch vehicle, developed with significant aid from Russia, also used a smaller version of the RD-170 engine named the RD-191. Korea's Naro 1 made its first successful flight in January.

 

And Russia's next-generation Angara rocket will also rely on the RD-191 engine. Despite years of delays, the Angara is seen in Russia as a replacement for the Proton rocket once it starts flying regularly.

 

Four cryogenic engines on Energia's core stage helped put the Buran shuttle into low Earth orbit.

 

The Buran did not carry its own main engines like the space shuttle. All of the Energia rocket's engines were thrown away on each mission.

 

But the Buran orbiter was meant to be reusable.

 

After two trips around the world, the Buran re-entered the atmosphere, gliding back to Earth and withstanding temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

Operating entirely on autopilot, oBuran landed at the Yubileiny airfield in Baikonur about 3 hours and 26 minutes after launch, wrapping its only flight in space, according to RSC Energia.

 

"For the first time ever, a spacecraft of such a class was landed completely automatically," says a mission description on RSC Energia's website.

 

The Buran shuttle program was canceled after the fall of the Soviet Union.

 

The flown Buran orbiter, affixed to another Energia rocket to appear as if it was ready for rollout to the launch pad, was crushed in the May 2002 collapse of a hangar at Baikonur. The hangar accident killed eight workers attempting to repair the building's roof.

 

A bright future in space

Space Coast again at center of human space exploration

 

Lynda Weatherman & Frank DiBello - Florida Today (Opinion)

 

A strong national program of human space exploration is an essential part of the Space Coast economy and a robust future at Kennedy Space Center.

 

The good news for Brevard County, KSC and all of Florida is that America is developing the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS), two programs that are helping to foster a new era of technological development and discovery in space with capabilities to support human missions to the moon, asteroids and beyond.

 

Even before the retirement of the shuttle program, state and local forethought enabled the rapid renovation of key KSC facilities such as the Operations & Checkout (O&C) building to develop this structure into a modern, state-of-the-art spacecraft manufacturing operation.

 

Space Florida, the state of Florida's spaceport authority and aerospace development agency, worked with the Economic Development Commission of Florida's Space Coast to secure the infrastructure modification funding enabling the assembly of the Orion spacecraft by NASA and Lockheed Martin at the O&C building.

 

During the past 12 months, 66,000 custom-designed pieces of the Orion — a critical component of America's successful future in human space exploration — have come together in that building, and hundreds of jobs are anticipated as a result of the Orion program alone. Florida's investment in space exploration and our region's workforce is paying off. We are less than one year away from Orion's first orbital mission, when the spacecraft will travel farther into space than any capsule since the days of Apollo.

 

During this test, an uncrewed Orion will launch from Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 37 atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket and travel more than 3,600 miles into space before landing. The flight will test and validate many systems aboard the spacecraft, such as its heat shield and thermal protection capabilities, to help reduce risks and costs for future human missions.

 

Similar progress has been made with the Space Launch System — a rocket more powerful than the Saturn V — in preparation for history-making human spaceflight missions and a support role for a variety of space science initiatives and national security payloads. Boeing is developing the core stages of this heavy-lift launch vehicle, and its Florida-based workforce is supporting SLS manufacturing and system validation testing at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility and Stennis Space Center.

 

Florida-based Aerojet/Rocketdyne and ATK teams are also heavily involved in the SLS initiative. A first test fire of the SLS is anticipated in 2016. Meanwhile, KSC is modernizing its ground operations infrastructure to support SLS processing and launch activities.

 

The 2014 Orion test mission is a precursor to an Orion-SLS test flight in 2017 and the first crewed operational missions slated to begin in 2021. These important and challenging events represent humanity's renewed quest to push the boundaries of knowledge and exploration — and they are reminding the world why we are rightfully called the Space Coast.

 

We are fortunate that support for our nation's space leadership through NASA's next-generation space exploration program begins here, as it should. The future is bright, and the exciting continuation of the groundbreaking work our scientists and engineers have been producing for generations will rumble to life in less than a year. The countdown to America reasserting its leadership role internationally in space exploration has begun.

 

MEANWHILE, HEADING TO MARS…

 

NASA Mars probe cleared for launch Monday

 

William Harwood – CBS News

 

NASA's next Mars probe is poised for launch Monday, weather permitting, to kick off a $671 million mission to find out why a good portion of the red planet's atmosphere leaked away ages ago in an extreme case of climate change that turned a once wet, once hospitable world into the dry, frigid wasteland it is today.

 

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution -- MAVEN -- spacecraft, perched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, is scheduled for takeoff from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 1:28 p.m. EST (GMT-5) Monday to begin a 10-month voyage to Mars for at least a year of science observations using a suite of sophisticated instruments.

 

"After all these years we're just a few days away from going to Mars," said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're poised to launch on day one of what we submitted as our final proposal five years ago."

 

Forecasters, however, are predicting a 40 percent chance of possibly thick clouds and isolated showers that could trigger a launch delay. The odds worsen to 60 percent "no-go" Tuesday with a 70 percent chance of flight rule violations on Wednesday.

 

But given a brief work stoppage during the early days of the government shutdown, a subsequent exemption to continue processing and the disruption the turmoil caused, Mitchell was clearly pleased to have only the weather to worry about.

 

"Weather and other things can set you back, but to be there launch ready gives us time to deal with anything downstream," he told reporters Friday. "So kudos to the team. It's not only on time, it's on budget, it has the full capability that we proposed years ago and it's been fully checked out."

 

Unlike recent NASA Mars missions that have primarily focused on the surface to determine the past and present habitability of the planet, Maven will concentrate on the martian atmosphere, repeatedly flying through its upper reaches to sample its constituents, probe its structure and measure how solar radiation and charged particles blasted away by the sun affect its evolution.

 

Mars does not have an active magnetic field to shield the planet from the effects of high energy radiation and electrically charged particles streaming by, which may act to carry away atoms and molecules in the upper reaches of the martian atmosphere.

 

Researchers hope to gain insights into how much of the atmosphere may be leaking into space today, how much might have been carried away over the past few billion years, what mechanisms were responsible and how those mechanisms might compare to others that apparently locked up some amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the martian crust.

 

"It's clear that major questions about the history of Mars center on the history of its climate and atmosphere and how that influenced the surface, the geology, and the possibility for life," Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado's Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said last month.

 

"MAVEN is going to focus on trying to understand what the history of the atmosphere has been, how the climate has changed through time and how that's influenced the evolution of the surface and potential habitability, at least by microbes, of Mars."

 

Jakosky said here is no question water once flowed on the surface of Mars and that the planet once had a much thicker atmosphere, "but somehow that atmosphere changed over time to the cold, dry environment that we see today, one that is too cold with an atmosphere too thin to be able to support liquid water. What we don't know is what the driver of that change has been."

 

"There are two places the atmosphere can go," he said. "It can down into the crust, it can go up to the top of the atmosphere and be lost to space. I think these questions of where did the water go, where did the CO2 go, from that early atmosphere are driving our exploration of Mars."

 

Tipping the scales at 5,410 pounds at launch, the MAVEN spacecraft measures 37.5 feet across its two solar panels, which provide between 1,150 and 1,700 watts of power. The orbiter is equipped with eight scientific instruments and a UHF communications package that can relay data back to Earth from rovers on the martian surface.

 

Six of the instruments will characterize particles and fields, measuring the interaction of the atmosphere with electrically charged particles from the sun and the impact of solar radiation. Two other instrument packages will carry out remote sensing and chemical analysis of particles in the martian atmosphere.

 

Assuming an on-time launch, it will take MAVEN 10 months to reach Mars, braking into an elliptical orbit around the red planet on Sept. 22, 2014. The parameters will vary throughout the mission, but the initial orbit will have a high point of some 3,860 miles and a low-point of 93 miles.

 

In addition, MAVEN will carry out five "deep dip" sessions lasting about five days each, dropping to a low point of around 78 miles to sample the atmosphere in regions where it is 30 times more dense than the regions studied during normal operations.

 

Guy Beutelschies, MAVEN project manager for spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., said the orbiter will not drop as deep into the atmosphere as NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which used a technique called aerobraking to achieve orbit. But it will still feel the wind rushing by.

 

"If you put your hand out when you were going through (the low point of the orbit) you'd feel a light breeze," he said. "It's really a modest amount of pressure. But it is of tremendous value to the scientists, being able to go down and get that in situ measurement of the atmosphere."

 

Maven is the 10th NASA spacecraft built to orbit Mars. If all goes well, it will join three other operational satellites now circling the red planet: NASA's Mars Odyssey, launched in 2001; the European Space Agency's Mars Express, launched in 2003, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2005.

 

In addition, NASA currently operates two rovers on the surface, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, launched in 2003, and the Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, launched in 2011 and now in its second year of surface operations.

 

The rovers currently use Odyssey and MRO to relay science data back to Earth and to receive commands from flight controllers. MAVEN is equipped with similar relay gear and will serve as a backup for use as needed by the rovers.

 

"There's quite an interest in this mission, and you wouldn't think so in that it's not as sexy as the rovers," said Omar Baez, NASA's launch director. "This is kind of like a weather satellite for Mars. ... It's an interesting mission, and it's captured the imagination."

 

NASA launching robotic explorer to Mars

 

Marcia Dunn - Associated Press

 

The Maven spacecraft was scheduled to blast off aboard an unmanned Atlas V rocket Monday afternoon.

 

NASA is sending Maven to Mars to study its upper atmosphere. Scientists want to know why Mars went from being warm and wet during its first billion years, to the cold and dry place it is today.

 

The early Martian atmosphere was thick enough to hold water and possibly support microbial life. But much of that atmosphere may have been lost to space, eroded by the sun.

 

"Something clearly happened," the University of Colorado's Bruce Jakosky, the principal Maven scientist, said on the eve of Maven's flight. "What we want to do is to understand what are the reasons for that change in the climate."

 

Maven — bearing eight science instruments — will take 10 months to reach Mars, entering into orbit around the red planet in September 2014.

 

The mission costs $671 million.

 

A question underlying all of NASA's 21 Mars missions to date is whether life could have started on what now seems to be a barren world.

 

"We don't have that answer yet, and that's all part of our quest for trying to answer, 'Are we alone in the universe?' in a much broader sense," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's science mission director.

 

Maven stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, with a capital "N'' in EvolutioN.

 

It is NASA's 21st shot at Mars. Fourteen of the previous 20 missions have succeeded, the most recent being the Curiosity rover that was launched in 2011 and landed in 2012.

 

That's a U.S. success rate of 70 percent. No other country comes close.

 

Curiosity's odometer reads 2.6 miles after more than a year of roving. An astronaut could accomplish that distance in about a day on the Martian surface, Grunsfeld noted Sunday.

 

Grunsfeld, a former astronaut, said considerable technology is needed, however, before humans can fly to Mars in the 2030s, NASA's ultimate objective.

 

The launch is scheduled for 1:28 p.m. launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

 

Mars orbiter aims to crack mystery of planet's lost water

 

Irene Klotz - Reuters

 

Scientists have no doubts that oceans and rivers once pooled on the surface of Mars, but what happened to all that water is a long-standing mystery.

 

The prime suspect is the sun, which has been peeling away the planet's atmosphere, molecule by molecule, for billions of years.

 

Exactly how that happens is the goal of NASA's new Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, which is scheduled for launch at 1:28 p.m. EST/1828 GMT on Monday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

 

Upon arrival in September 2014, MAVEN will put itself into orbit around Mars and begin scrutinizing the thin layer of gases that remains in its skies.

 

"MAVEN is going to focus on trying to understand what the history of the atmosphere has been, how the climate has changed through time and how that has influenced the evolution of the surface and the potential habitability - at least by microbes - of Mars,' said lead scientist Bruce Jakosky, with the University of Colorado at Boulder.

 

Specifically, MAVEN will look at how much and what type of radiation is coming from the sun and other cosmic sources and how that impacts gases in Mars' upper atmosphere.

 

Scientists have glimpsed the process from data collected by Europe's Mars Express orbiter and NASA's Curiosity rover, but never had the opportunity to profile the atmosphere and space environment around Mars simultaneously.

 

"We'll get a window on what is happening now so we can try and look backward at the evidence locked in the rocks and put the whole story together about Martian history and how it came to be such a challenging environment," said Mars scientist Pan Conrad, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

 

Earth's lost twin?

 

The evidence for a warmer, wetter, more Earth-like Mars has been building for decades. 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.

 

"The atmosphere must have been thicker for the planet to be warmer and wetter. The question is where did all that carbon dioxide and the water go?" Jakosky said.

 

There are two places the atmosphere could go: down into the ground or up into space.

 

Scientists know some of the planet's carbon dioxide ended up on the surface and joined with minerals in the crust. But so far, the ground inventory is not large enough to account for the early, thick atmosphere Mars would have needed to support water on its surface.

 

Instead, scientists suspect that most of the atmosphere was lost into space, a process that began about 4 billion years ago when the planet's protective magnetic field mysteriously turned off.

 

"If you have a global magnetic field, it causes the solar wind to stand off. It pushes it away so it isn't able to strip away atmosphere," Jakosky said.

 

Without a magnetic field, Mars became ripe pickings for solar and cosmic radiation, a process that continues today.

 

MAVEN's prime mission is expected to last one year, enough time for scientists to collect data during a variety of solar storms and other space weather events.

 

Afterward, MAVEN will remain in orbit for up to 10 years serving as a communications relay for Curiosity, a follow-on rover slated to launch in 2020 and a lander that is being designed to study the planet's deep interior.

 

If MAVEN is launched as planned on Monday, it is due to reach Mars on September 22 - two days before India's Mars Orbiter Mission, which launched on November 5. India's probe has been raising its orbit around Earth and should be in position on December 1 to begin the journey to Mars.

 

If weather or technical problems prevent Monday's launch, NASA has 20 days to get MAVEN off the ground while Earth and Mars are favorably aligned for the probe to reach Mars.

 

Maven Ready For Launch To Mars

 

Frank Morring, Jr. - Aviation Week

 

Weather remained the main hurdle Sunday for an on-time launch of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) mission, an orbiter designed to answer the question "where did the water go" on the Red Planet.

 

A two-hour launch widow opens at 1:28 p.m. EST Monday, raising hope that expected cloud cover will clear enough during that time for the mission to get underway atop its Atlas V401 launch vehicle. Forecasters predicted a 40% change of a weather scrub on Monday, increasing to 60% on Tuesday and Wednesday when upper level winds were expected to complicate the picture.

 

The $671 million mission is designed to deliver nine atmospheric sensors into an elliptical orbit around Mars next September. They were chosen to measure the processes scientists believe may have caused the transformation from a wet planet with a relatively thick atmosphere to the cold dry planet we see today, where atmospheric pressure at the surface is comparable to the thin atmosphere at 100,000 ft. above Earth, according to Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado, the mission's principal investigator.

 

Data generated by Maven may also one day help spacecraft engineers design a way to land the estimated 20-ton vehicles needed for human missions to the surface through that thin atmosphere.

 

In general, planetary scientists theorize Mars started losing its atmosphere about 1 billion years ago, which its "internal dynamo" essentially shut down as the planet's core solidified, depriving its upper atmosphere of the protection provided on Earth by the global magnetic field. Exposed to the full force of the solar wind, the atmosphere gradually leaked into space, taking most of the water that once ran on the planet's surface with it.

 

Maven's sensors will study the processes that researchers believe enable that leakage, allowing them to backtrack to an estimate of what the primordial atmosphere was like. That information will advance understanding of whether life could have once existed on Mars, and perhaps if it still does, according to Janet Luhmann of the University of California at Berkeley, the mission's deputy principal investigator.

 

The mission profile will also take the spacecraft on "deep dives" into the upper and middle Martian atmosphere for in situ measurements that can be correlated with broader data it generates. Those dives, which will remain high enough that the spacecraft or its wing-like solar arrays won't be damaged, will provide information that may one day aid a human landing, according to Michael Gazarik, associate administrator for space technology at NASA headquarters.

 

The agency's advanced-technology work includes a number of approaches to improve on the "Sky Crane" method used to land the 1-ton Curiosity rover on the surface, to the point that payloads 20-times larger can safely touch down. Gazarik's organization already has tested an inflatable hypersonic decelerator at Mach 10 and 20 gs in a sounding rocket test, while the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is experimenting with supersonic Mars parachutes able to handle larger loads than Curiosity, which represents the state of the art today. Also in the works is supersonic retropropulsion, which would use retro-rockets to slow the lander.

 

"We have limited data," Gazarik said. "Curisoity was the first time we measured comprehensively how do we fly through that atmosphere, what was the heat rate through the atmosphere, did we fly that vehicle like we predicted? Maven will also add to our ability to understand the Martian atmosphere."

 

Thrift pays for extra science by NASA's MAVEN mission

 

Stephen Clark - SpaceflightNow.com

 

Citing cost-conscious caution in the early days of the development of NASA's MAVEN mission, scientists say the Mars probe has enough leftover funds to bankroll extra researchers on the MAVEN science team and enhance data analysis models to get the most out of the spacecraft's survey of the Martian atmosphere.

 

Managers say the MAVEN is on track to come in under its $671 million budget, and NASA had enough confidence in the project's accounting figures to approve the elimination of some of the mission's reserves, which serve as an emergency fund in case engineers run into unexpected trouble.

 

NASA permitted mission managers to transfer some of the project's development funds into an account known as Phase E, which pays for post-launch operations, according to David Mitchell, project manager for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

 

"This allows us to buy more science," Mitchell said. "It provides an ability for the principal investigator to augment his team and data analysis capability to provide more science return."

 

MAVEN officials hesitate to quote a figure for mission's expected cost until accountants crunch the mission's final budget.

 

"Although everybody is claiming that we will underrun [our budget], myself included, the reality is that until we're done, the best we can say is that we're on track to underrun," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN's principal investigator at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "After launch, we'll know what our actual expenses were and can come up with a realistic estimate of how much under we were."

 

Jakosky said the mission's robust finances allowed NASA to invest in expanding its scientific impact.

 

"Over the past year, our financial condition was such that we were able to fund additional science activities out of project reserves," Jakosky said. "Activities that we funded included development of numerical models to be used in data analysis, more elaborate and more capable data visualization and manipulation tools, additional support for the instrument teams and for each investigator so that we have a more robust data analysis program, and additional science team members."

 

It's not every day an interplanetary mission spends less money than it committed to. NASA's last Mars mission, the Curiosity rover, cost $2.5 billion - nearly $900 million more than NASA originally asked for.

 

According to Jakosky, he added back one co-investigator to the MAVEN science team when it was clear the mission could afford it. The co-investigator was cut from the mission early on in its development when the budget looked inadequate, Jakosky said.

 

Ten participating scientists were also added to the MAVEN team out of the mission's budget reserves, along with several researchers known as "collaborators" who will require little or no NASA funding, according to Jakosky.

 

Mission planners came up with the idea for MAVEN in 2003, and NASA selected it for funding and flight in 2008 under the agency's Mars Scout program, a line of cost-capped missions with focused objectives.

 

The mission is devoted to studying the upper atmosphere of Mars, with an aim to learn how and how long ago the red planet's once-thick atmosphere leaked out to space, leaving a tenuous layer of gas hanging over the Martian surface.

 

When the bulk of the atmosphere was lost, scientists say the potential for life likely went along with it.

 

The Mars Scout program has been discontinued since MAVEN's selection, with future red planet probes to be developed as flagship missions - the most costly projects in NASA's portfolio - or in the Discovery program, which has an umbrella that covers spacecraft studying the entire solar system.

 

In order to keep under NASA's strict budget cap, Jakosky convened an experienced team of scientists, institutions and contractors to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

 

Variations of all of MAVEN's science instruments have flown before, but not all on one spacecraft at Mars. The probe itself was built by Lockheed Martin Corp. and based on the company's long line of interplanetary spacecraft, most recently the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Jupiter-bound Juno mission.

 

Lockheed Martin used work on previous missions to MAVEN's benefit, said Guy Beutelschies, the company's MAVEN program manager.

 

Beutelschies said designers based MAVEN's spacecraft bus, propulsion module and communications systems on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched to the red planet in 2005. And engineers recycled much of the software and avionics used on Juno for MAVEN.

 

"The structure of MAVEN is almost identical to MRO," Beutelschies said, adding MAVEN is a bit smaller but has a larger fuel tank.

 

Partially out of cost concerns, Jakosky also said no to a proposal to put a camera on MAVEN.

 

"We gave serious thought to it, and ultimately the reason for our decision was we're a focused science mission," Jakosky said. "We had to make decisions to include some things and to leave other things off."

 

MAVEN managers considered adding a student-built camera to MAVEN similar to the MoonKAM payload on NASA's GRAIL lunar gravity probes which launched in 2011. MoonKAM was led by Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, as an outreach tool for middle school students.

 

"The cost of building it, the cost of integrating it into the spacecraft, and the impact on our data return - because we're a data-limited mission - the complexity of doing it, those won out," Jakosky said. "At the time, we were right up against our cap, and we thought it was not a good use of precious reserves to go down that route."

 

Orbiter scheduled to begin trek to Mars today

MAVEN will study Red Planet's upper crust

 

James Dean - Florida Today

 

Water is believed to have flowed through rivers and lakes on ancient Mars, supported by a thicker, warmer atmosphere.

 

Microbial life might have flourished in that climate more than 3.5 billion years ago.

 

But today the Red Planet is a cold, dry desert.

 

"Why do we appear to have had a climate on Mars that could have supported life at the surface early on, and we don't today?" asked Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the lead scientist for NASA's MAVEN mission. "Something fundamentally changed, and we want to understand what those changes were."

 

The $671 million MAVEN mission hopes to begin solving that puzzle with a 1:28 p.m. blastoff today atop an Atlas V rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

 

There's a 60 percent chance of favorable weather during the two-hour launch window.

 

After a successful launch, the MAVEN spacecraft will take 10 months to reach orbit around Mars, where it will perform science observations for at least one Earth year.

 

Scientists say the water and greenhouse gasses once abundant in Mars' thicker atmosphere could have gone in two directions: down, to be absorbed by the planet's crust, or up, escaping to space through the top of the atmosphere.

 

MAVEN — short for "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN" — will focus on the latter as the most likely driver behind Mars' loss of atmosphere and resulting climate change.

 

Eight science instruments carrying nine sensors will study the makeup of the upper atmosphere, and how it reacts to solar wind and storms thought responsible for stripping molecules away over time.

 

"The sun is a major player in this mission," said Janet Luhmann, MAVEN deputy principal investigator from the University of California at Berkeley. "The atmosphere is more or less exposed most everywhere to the direct onslaught of what's coming from the sun."

 

That's because Mars lacks a protective magnetic field like Earth's. It disappeared when Mars was about a billion years old, and the loss of atmosphere began around the same time, when solar activity was more intense.

 

The length of a school bus with its solar arrays deployed, the Lockheed Martin-built MAVEN spacecraft will soar as high as 3,900 miles and as low as 93 miles above the surface.

 

Five times it will perform "deep dip" campaigns, dropping to an altitude of 78 miles to sample denser regions.

 

By understanding what's eating away at the atmosphere at slow rates today, and combining that with historical models of solar activity, mission scientists will be able to extrapolate how Mars' atmosphere and climate changed over billions of years.

 

They say that knowledge has broader implications for understanding whether life could have been possible on Mars or other planets, particularly as more and more planets are being discovered, including some potentially like Earth.

 

"We're understanding processes by which a planetary environment can change through time," said Jakosky. "We want to understand what makes a planet habitable, and what makes a planet go from being habitable to not being habitable?"

 

In addition to its primary science mission, MAVEN carries an antenna that will serve as a backup communications link between Earth and the rovers and landers operating on Mars.

 

The science mission could be extended after the initial year is up.

 

"It's going to answer a key question about Mars' evolution," said Michael Meyer, lead Mars scientist at NASA headquarters.

 

MAVEN mission

 

·         Mission: NASA orbiter that will study Mars' upper atmosphere and history of climate change

·         Launch time: 1:28 p.m.

·         Launch window: Two hours

·         Weather: 60 percent "go"

·         Pad: Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

·         Rocket: United Launch Alliance Atlas V

 

Developing a Fax Machine to Copy Life on Mars

 

Andrew Pollack – New York Times

 

J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist, is looking for a new world to conquer — Mars. He wants to detect life on Mars and bring it to Earth using a device called a digital biological converter, or biological teleporter.

 

Although the idea conjures up "Star Trek," the analogy is not exact. The transporter on that program actually moves Captain Kirk from one location to another. Dr. Venter's machine would merely create a copy of an organism from a distant location — more like a biological fax machine.

 

Still, Dr. Venter, known for his early sequencing of the human genome and for his bold proclamations, predicts the biological converter will be his next innovation and will be useful on Earth well before it could ever be deployed on the red planet.

 

The idea behind it, not original to him, is that the genetic code that governs life can be stored in a computer and transmitted just like any other information.

 

Dr. Venter's system would determine the sequence of the DNA units in an organism's genome and transmit that information electronically. At the distant location, the genome would be synthesized — or chemically recreated — inserted into what amounts to a blank cell, and "booted up," as Mr. Venter puts it. In other words, the inserted DNA would take command of the cell and recreate a copy of the original organism.

 

To test some ideas, he and a small team of scientists from his company and from NASA spent the weekend here in the Mojave Desert, the closest stand-in they could find for the dry surface of Mars.

 

The biological fax is not as far-fetched as it seems. DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis are rapidly becoming faster and cheaper. For now, however, synthesizing an organism's entire genome is still generally too difficult. So the system will first be used to remotely clone individual genes, or perhaps viruses. Single-celled organisms like bacteria might come later. More complex creatures, earthly or Martian, will probably never be possible.

 

Dr. Venter's company, Synthetic Genomics, and his namesake nonprofit research institute have already used the technology to help develop an experimental vaccine for the H7N9 bird flu with the drug maker Novartis.

 

Typically, when a new strain of flu virus appears, scientists must transport it to labs, which can spend weeks perfecting a strain that can be grown in eggs or animal cells to make vaccine.

 

But when H7N9 appeared in China in February, its genome was sequenced by scientists there and made publicly available. Within days, Dr. Venter's team had synthesized the two main genes and used them to make a vaccine strain, without having to wait for the virus to arrive from China.

 

Dr. Venter said Synthetic Genomics would start selling a machine next year that would automate the synthesis of genes by stringing small pieces of DNA together to make larger ones.

 

Eventually, he said, "we'll have a small box like a printer attached to your computer." A person with a bacterial infection might be sent the code to recreate a virus intended to kill that specific bacterium.

 

"We can send an antibiotic as an email," said Dr. Venter, who has outlined his ideas in a new book, "Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life." Proteins might also be made, so that diabetics, for instance, could "download insulin from the Internet."

 

Dr. Venter, 67, has many scientific achievements — though critics deride some of them as stunts — but has had less success converting his ideas into successful businesses.

 

A previous company, Celera Genomics, raced the federally funded Human Genome Project to determine the complete DNA sequence in human chromosomes. The race was declared a tie in 2000, but Celera could not sustain a business selling the genomic information.

 

A deal worth up to $600 million that Synthetic Genomics made with Exxon Mobil in 2009 to produce biofuels using algae has been scaled back to a research project.

 

In 2010, Dr. Venter made headlines by creating what some considered the first man-made life. His team synthesized the genome of one species of bacterium and transplanted it into a slightly different species. The transplanted DNA took command of its new host cell, which then multiplied, passing on the synthetic genome.

 

Critics said Dr. Venter had not really created life, just copied it. Dr. Venter said in the interview that while he did not create life from scratch, he had created a new type of life.

 

"DNA is the software of life, and to get new life, you just have to change the software," he said.

 

Dr. Venter said his team was designing a genome that was not a copy of an existing one and trying to insert it into a host cell. "It's not alive yet," he said. "We're close."

 

George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said there was nothing unique about Dr. Venter's work so far because others had already synthesized viruses based on DNA sequence information available on the Internet.

 

"Most people in the past didn't call it teleportation," he said, "but if you want to, fine."

 

He also questioned the utility of doing genome engineering to make a copy of something, rather than "doing genome engineering to make something new and exotic and potentially useful."

 

Space exploration is one area where the teleporter might be especially useful. It would be extremely costly and time-consuming to send a medicine physically to a colonist on another planet who becomes sick. And it would be difficult to send a sample from Mars back to Earth.

 

That is why Dr. Venter's team was camped here this weekend, about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The mission was to find microbial life in the desert, determine its sequence and transmit it to Synthetic Genomics' headquarters in San Diego.

 

This dry run was far from the automated process that would be needed on Mars. Two scientists spent hours Friday in a bus filled with laboratory equipment, carefully scraping green microbes off rocks and preparing their DNA for sampling. The sequencing, done on a desktop machine in the bus, took 26 hours.

 

Chris McKay, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who is working on the project, said the bus would have to be shrunk to a shoe box to make it feasible for a Mars mission, which would take many years and dollars. "By the time we get to Mars, we will have spent $500 million on that shoe box," he said.

 

But sequencing machines are rapidly becoming smaller. A team at Harvard and M.I.T. is hoping to have a sequencer ready for use in a Mars mission departing in 2020.

 

Of course, all this assumes there is life on Mars to begin with and that it is based on DNA.

 

But that can be left for another day. Dr. Venter is known for combining business with pleasure, such as when he sailed his yacht around the world to collect ocean life for sequencing. He arrived here Friday in a pickup truck hauling three motorcycles and some libations.

 

After touring a site on Friday from which his scientists had collected rocks on which green cyanobacteria were growing, Dr. Venter declared: "We've had the quartz. Now, let's get a pint."

 

Beam us up, Craig!

 

END

 

 

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