Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology NewsletterVolume 12, Number 24, 11 July 2005

Editor/Publisher: David J. Thomas, Ph.D., Science Division, Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas 72503-2317, USA. dthomas@lyon.edu

Marsbugs is published on a weekly to monthly basis as warranted by the number of articles and announcements. Copyright of this compilation exists with the editor, but individual authors retain the copyright of specific articles. Opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the authors, and are not necessarily endorsed by the editor or by Lyon College. E-mail subscriptions are free, and may be obtained by contacting the editor. Information concerning the scope of this newsletter, subscription formats and availability of back-issues is available at http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs. The editor does not condone "spamming" of subscribers. Readers would appreciate it if others would not send unsolicited e-mail using the Marsbugs mailing lists. Persons who have information that may be of interest to subscribers of Marsbugs should send that information to the editor.

Articles and News

Page 1 MARS IN POP CULTURE: LITERATUREBy David Catling

Page 4 THE CASE FOR A SMALL CEVBy Robert Zubrin

Page 4 THE BARNARD'S STAR BLUNDERBy Alan Boss

Page 5 MARS MORE ACTIVE AND COMPLEX THAN EXPECTEDBy Robert Roy Britt

Page 6 PAPER SAYS EDIBLE MEAT CAN BE GROWN IN A LAB ON INDUSTRIAL SCALEUniversity of Maryland release

Page 6 AN EARTHLY VIEW OF MARSBy Dale Anderson

Page 7 THE MARTIAN HEAT SIGNATUREBased on an ASU report

Page 8 BEWARE THE MARS HOAX: EARTH AND MARS ARE CONVERGING FOR A CLOSE ENCOUNTER, BUT NOT AS CLOSE AS SOME PEOPLE THINKBy Tony Phillips

Page 8 THE ONE-AND-A-HALF PERCENT SOLUTIONBy Alan Boss

Announcements

Page 9 NEW EARTH AND LIFE STUDIES WEB SITENational Academies release

Page 9 NASA AMES FAMILY NIGHT HOMES IN ON COMET IMPACTSNASA/ARC media advisory 05-40AR

Mission Reports

Page 9 CASSINI UPDATESNASA/JPL releases

Page 12 DEEP IMPACT UPDATESMultiple agencies' releases

Page 16 FLASHLINE MARS "CREW GREENLEAF" PREPARES TO REACH DEVON ISLANDMars Society release

Page 16 MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS UPDATENASA/JPL release

Page 16 MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGESNASA/JPL/MSSS release

Page 17 MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGESNASA/JPL/ASU release

MARS IN POP CULTURE: LITERATUREBy David CatlingFrom Astrobiology Magazine30 June 2005

Why is it that people tend to talk of "Martians," rather than, say, "Saturnians" or "Jovians," when the topic of extraterrestrial life is broached? Historically, Mars was thought to be the most likely of the planets to harbor life. Popular culture in the form of literature, and then later radio and film, reflected such beliefs.

Red Mars. Image credit: ESA.

Public fascination with Martians began in the late 19th century when, in 1877, astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported observations of large canali (meaning "channels") on Mars. Unfortunately, the term "canali" was mistranslated as "canals" in English. The Suez Canal, an engineering marvel

of its time, had been completed in 1869, suggesting to some people that innovative Martians must have built the martian canals.

In 1897, H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds was the first major work to explore the concept of the extraterrestrial invader. This concept exerted a considerable influence on the public psyche, and consequently, Mars began to take a special place in popular culture around the turn of the 20th century. Even astronomers such as Percival Lowell seriously countenanced the possibility of advanced lifeforms as described in his book, Mars as the Abode of Life (1910).

Of course, this is not to belittle the unique role Mars has played in the history of science. In particular, the recorded movement of Mars in the night sky led Johannes Kepler to formulate his three laws of planetary motion (two in 1609 and the third in 1618). These laws shattered medieval, anthropocentric notions of astronomy, and laid the foundations for the discoveries of Isaac Newton.

By looking at how Mars is represented in literature, radio and film, we can see how it has inspired human imagination, sometimes in rather peculiar ways. The following is a review of Mars in the history of literature.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the great Irish writer and satirist, makes a curious reference to Mars's satellites in Gulliver's Travels. In the book, astronomers on the fictional island of Laputa (whose king is fond of solving mathematical

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problems) are said to have discovered two satellites around Mars. Swift details the orbital mechanics with reference to Kepler's laws. (Read Gulliver's Travels online at http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/contents.html).

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.

Part III, Chapter 3:"[The astronomers] have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the center of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies."

Mars does have two moons—Phobos, the inner satellite, and Deimos, the outer one. But they were not discovered until 1877, by the American astronomer Asaph Hall. Was the assumption of two satellites just a lucky guess on Swift's part? And was it also coincidental that he correctly guessed that the inner satellite orbited Mars in less than a day? (Phobos has an orbital period of 0.32 of a day; Deimos 1.26 of a day).

Kepler had speculated that Mars had two moons, and Swift was almost certainly aware of this. Kepler based his speculation on naive mathematical intuition: because Venus had no moon and Earth had one moon, Mars must have two moons as an outwards progression from the sun.

Herbert G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (serialized: 1897, book: 1898)

The Wars of the Worlds is the story of the invasion of Earth by technologically-advanced Martians. The Martians flee their dying planet and descend in ten immense rocket capsules in southern England. Their plan, to take over the Earth and its resources, begins with an attack on London. People flee in panic, helpless against the superior weaponry of the Martians, which includes a Heat Ray and poisonous Black Smoke. Victory seems secure when suddenly the Martians succumb to a fatal infection by terrestrial germs. (The whole text of The War of the Worlds is available online at http://www.bartleby.com/1002/).

The 1890s were unhappy times for Wells as a struggling writer but fortunate ones for his literature. The War of the Worlds is a classic of English literature and much unlike the tawdry, sensationalist sci-fi writing and films that have imitated and recapitulated Wells's ideas. In the novel, a Wells-like writer on philosophy and science narrates the story. The book reflects a period when a transition was occurring in Wells's thinking from the entirely pessimistic worldview of his earlier The Time Machine (1895) to a more optimistic vision for future mankind evident in Wells's later writing.

Historically, The War of the Worlds followed a series of semi-documentary novels that predicted war in Europe following the unification and militarization of Germany beginning with George Chesney's The Battle of

Dorking (1871). In addition, The War of the Worlds is very much a product of ideas that were at the forefront of Wells's nineteenth century mind. These include Darwinism, i.e. cumulative selection in biological systems, and a growing awareness of the unpleasant side effects of technology such as industrial slums, instruments of war, and irresponsible power. The monstrous Martians, the narrator tells us, have mutated with the help of technology from their once humanoid form to a disgusting, vampire-like state—they are a possible future for mankind. Apparent progress has somehow led to decline.

Indeed, this idea is inherent in the vulnerability of the Martians: "Micro-organisms... have either never appeared on Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages ago." So it is biology that ultimately defeats the Martians: "These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our pre-human ancestors since life began here... By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all-comers... For neither do men live nor die in vain."

The last sentence, which ordinarily would be a cliché of Victorian sentimentality, is a Darwinist insight in this context. The moral, perhaps, to Wells's story is that technology will not defeat us or turn us into the nightmare Martians as long as we hold fast to our diverse biological heritage—a moral which is just as relevant to our environmentally-threatened world today as it was to Victorian England.

Famous opening paragraph: (note how the ubiquitous micro-organisms which prove crucial later in the plot are mentioned here at the very beginning of the novel).

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."

Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Martian Tales

Perhaps better known as the creator of "Tarzan of the Apes," Edgar Rice Burroughs also wrote westerns and science fiction—a total of 97 stories. Burroughs's series of Mars novels, also known as "The Martian Tales," is comprised of eleven novels which describe the adventures of a nineteenth century Confederate Civil War veteran (like Burroughs's father) named John Carter who is transported to Mars, where he must adapt to its strange cultures. (Burroughs's works can be accessed online at http://www.literature.org/authors/burroughs-edgar-rice/).

Carter, as a classic fictional hero, frequently encounters life-threatening situations which he only narrowly escapes. Carter marries, has children, rises to the top of martian politics, and there fights for justice. His noble actions reflect Burroughs's personal moral beliefs. Burroughs, like many other writers, envisions a dying Mars with oceans that are drying up and constantly warring kingdoms fighting desperately against the peril of a vanishing atmosphere and against each other.

"I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the fact; neither did I."

The often used phrase "little green men" to refer to aliens may have come from Burroughs's first book on Mars, A Princess on Mars. He describes the

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"green men of Mars," and they reappear frequently in his other Martian novels. Still, he never uses the exact phrase.

Was Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan's creator, thinking of a martian jungle?

The Oxford English Dictionary's first reference for "little green man" is from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906). Its use here refers to an actual person who has been tattooed green, and so although it coins the phrase "little green man," it does not appear to be a reference to aliens. The next OED reference to "little green men" is not until 1961, from Partridge's Dictionary of Slang: "Little green men, mysterious beings alleged to have been seen emerging from flying saucers."

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1951, also published as The Silver Locusts)

Ray Bradbury's thought-provoking science fiction, written in highly literate prose, arguably makes him one of the world's best science fiction authors. The Martian Chronicles is a collection of loosely tied short stories, which together comprise the story of man's conquest of Mars. Many of the chapters in The Martian Chronicles were published separately, sometimes with minor changes, sometimes with different titles; these include "There Will Come Soft Rains," "The Fire Balloons," and others.

In early science fiction, Martians are the most common culprits for invasions of Earth—a trend that started with The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. In Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, it is the other way around: humans are the alien invaders on Mars. As in H. G. Wells's seminal novel, the Martians are killed by terrestrial bacteria. But this time the Martians are a beautiful, wise and ancient civilization. The book raises important questions about human behavior, and how people should react when they encounter alien races. It is a study of man's selfishness, in particular, the destruction of culture by ignorant politicians and businessmen.

"...The Men of Earth came to Mars. They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all... it was not unusual that the first men were few. The numbers grew steadily in proportion to the census of Earth Men already on Mars. There was comfort in numbers. But the first Lonely Ones had to stand by themselves..."

For further information, see: The Martian Chronicles Study Guide (http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fiction/martian_chronicles.html) and The Ray Bradbury Page (http://raybradburyonline.com/).

Left: Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Center: Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Right: Blue Mars, from Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

"I have been a stranger in a strange land," Exodus 2:22, gave the title to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. This book tends to be a favorite amongst sci-fi fans—it won a Hugo award in 1962. It was the first book by a devoted science-fiction writer to reach the New York Times best-seller list.

Valentine Michael Smith, born on Mars, is the sole survivor of the first manned mission to the planet. Subsequently, he is raised and educated by Martians. When Smith visits Earth as a young man, he has human instincts but an alien perspective and superhuman psychic powers.

The time is roughly the 1990s, as written from the 1960s, and terrestrial society is envisioned to be highly commercialized and corrupt ("He's an honest politician. He stays bought."). Smith progresses from a total ignorance of this (essentially western) culture to an understanding of human psychology. Eventually, his efforts to reconcile human and martian sensibilities give rise to a new "free love" religion through which people achieve spiritual transformation. There is a tragic but unsurprising ending.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1995), Blue Mars (1997)

This trilogy is a thought-provoking story of terraforming Mars that stretches more than three centuries into the future. What distinguishes Kim Stanley Robinson's books from other science fiction is the sheer array of socio-economic issues that is confronted: post-corporate governance, environmental ethics, population growth, human longevity, and natural capital issues. On the other hand, the trilogy does suffer from the intransigent assumptions of a "technological optimist" worldview. (Is terraforming Mars really possible, I ask?)

Red Mars describes the colonization efforts of the first hundred settlers on Mars. Splits develop between colonists favoring rapid terraforming to a "Green Mars" and a minority of "Reds" who want to see Mars preserved in its present state. Issues of corporate control versus democracy eventually culminate in an attempt by the Martians to gain independence from Earth and its transnationals.

The second book, Green Mars, deals with the transition of Mars to an Earth-like world with a breathable atmosphere in the late 21st century. Meanwhile Earth itself is undergoing severe environmental catastrophes due to environmental degradation by the cumulative effects of industrial pollution. Blue Mars describes the resolution of conflicts in terrestrial and Martian societies.

Other novels

This discussion of books about Mars is by no means exhaustive, but merely presents some highlights. Other contemporary Mars novels worth mentioning include Ben Bova's Mars and Return to Mars, Greg Bear's Moving Mars, Geoffrey Landis's Mars Crossing, and C. K. Anderson's A Step Beyond.

Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1625.html.

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THE CASE FOR A SMALL CEVBy Robert ZubrinMars Society release (originally published in the July 4, 2005 issue of Space News)6 July 2005

There is a strong case to be made for downsizing the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) into a much smaller, cheaper, and lighter vehicle than the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) derivatives currently under widespread discussion. The OSP was conceived of as a means of servicing the crew rotations of the International Space Station at lower cost and lower risk than the Space Shuttle. It was thus specified that it be able to carry a crew of at least five, to approach the Shuttle's crew ferrying capability. To meet this goal, vehicle masses on the order of 12 ton or more were considered acceptable, since the OSP was only going to orbit, and launch capabilities to deliver such mass to LEO are readily obtainable.

However, now NASA's mission has changed, and instead of perpetual flights to orbit we are reaching for the Moon and Mars, and the question must be asked whether such a large crew carrying vehicle really is optimal to support these new goals. In fact, it is not.

The simplest, safest, least expensive, and most capable Lunar base transportation system is one based upon direct launch to the Lunar surface, and direct return with no Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR), using a single launch vehicle. This is so because the direct return architecture requires the least number of vehicle elements to develop, expends the fewest hardware elements per flight, has the fewest necessary operations per mission, avoids the need for untended mission critical liabilities in Lunar orbit, always has its return launch window to Earth open, and also has the lowest recurring mission launch mass once lunar oxygen production commences at the base. Doing each mission with one launch is also extremely important, because a multiple launch mission architecture not only costs more, it greatly increases mission risk. Indeed, a multi-launch Lunar mission will fail not only if any one of its several launches is lost, but also if weather or other reasons should cause any launch after the first to be delayed beyond the boiloff endurance of any of the cryogenic flight elements launched earlier.

This being the case, there is a direct relationship between the capability of the Heavy Lift Vehicle (HLV) NASA chooses for development and the allowable mass of the CEV. The fastest route to creating a HLV at this point is by reconfiguring the hardware of the Space Shuttle stack, deleting the Orbiter and replacing it with a fairing and an upper stage. A variety of such Shuttle derived HLVs are possible, with LEO delivery capabilities ranging from 70 to 130 tons, with the more capable versions costing more to develop.

Indications are that NASA has decided to develop such a vehicle, with the preferred variant in the mid range, offering roughly 100 tons to LEO lift capability. This would be a very reasonable choice.

If that is the decision made, then the math that determines acceptable CEV mass follows directly. Using a hydrogen/oxygen stage for Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) and Lunar Orbit Capture, and a hydrogen/oxygen propelled lander, a system that launches 100 tons to LEO would also be able to deliver 20 tones of payload to the Lunar surface. If direct return is to be used, this 20 tons must include the CEV plus its ascent stage for flight back to Earth. Using hydrogen/oxygen propulsion for the ascent stage, an 8.6 ton CEV could be thus delivered round trip to the Moon. If instead, for superior long-term storability, methane/oxygen propulsion is chosen for ascent, then the CEV capsule would have to be limited to 7.4 tons.

Such lightweight CEV capsules are certainly possible. For example, the Apollo capsule, which transported three people to Lunar orbit and back, had a mass of about 6 tons.

Thus a lightweight, Apollo capsule derived 3-4 person CEV would allow a direct return lunar mission with a single launch, but a heavy 5-6 person OSP clone would not. If the heavy OSP clone is chosen, then development of a Lunar transportation system would require either development of a second generation super heavy lift booster, an entire lunar excursion module manned spacecraft system, or implementation of a costly, complex, and failure prone multi-launch mission architecture.

In short, developing a CEV that is too heavy for the HLV to launch to the Moon and direct return back would be a huge mistake. If the CEV matches the direct return mission capability of the HLV, then the only additional

hardware elements needed to begin lunar exploration are the TLI/LOC stage and the lander. The same lander used to deliver the CEV and its ascent stage could also deliver heavy cargo such as a 20 tonne habitation module (ISS modules weigh 20 tons), making long duration lunar surface stays possible right from the start of the program.

But the small CEV not only cheapens and accelerates the Lunar program, it cheapens and accelerates the CEV program itself. The funds saved by reducing the size and cost of the CEV could be used to start HLV development immediately, which would save further funds, since early deployment of the HLV would allow space station construction to be completed sooner, allowing early retirement of the $4 billion per year Space Shuttle.

By reducing the size of the CEV to close derivative of the Apollo capsule, the CEV program could be turned from an extended developmental contractor banquet into a production procurement. With development minimized, NASA could compete a contract of the following form: "The winner of this contract will be paid $300 million each for five CEVs if they are delivered in 2008, plus $200 million each for five CEVs delivered in 2009, and $100 million each for five CEVs delivered per year starting in 2010 through 2015." Such a contract form would provide a strong incentive for early delivery of the CEV, thereby allowing early retirement of the Space Shuttle without any discontinuity of US human spaceflight capability. Furthermore, it would eliminate nearly all NASA expenditure on the CEV program during 2006 and 2007, allowing these funds to be reprogrammed for immediate development of the HLV. Together with other savings obtained by canceling useless programs such as the Hubble deorbit module, these funds should be sufficient to pay for the entire HLV development.

So to summarize, the choice of small CEV enables an optimum single- launch, direct-return, Lunar mission architecture. It also enables a reduced cost, accelerated commercial procurement of the CEV itself. The savings in the CEV program thus obtained can be used to launch the HLV program immediately, and together the CEV and HLV would allow early retirement of the Space Shuttle, with massive savings to the taxpayer resulting.

Furthermore, with a CEV matched to an HLV for direct lunar missions in hand, and STS retired or nearly so, outgoing NASA Administrator Griffin would be able to say to the President elect in January 2009: "We have 80% of the hardware needed for human lunar missions already developed, and have freed the funds required to develop the rest. If you choose to go forward with flat funding, we can have humans on the Moon by 2012, and Mars by 2016, by the end of your second term. The choice is yours."

It's a winning pitch.

Dr. Robert Zubrin, an astronautical engineer, is president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars (Simon and Schuster 1996), Entering Space (Tarcher Putnam 1999) and Mars on Earth (Tarcher Penguin 2003).

An in-depth discussion of strategies to get the Moon-Mars initiative off the ground will be held at the 8th international Mars Society convention, University of Colorado Boulder, August 11-14, 2005. Registration is now open at www.marssociety.org.

THE BARNARD'S STAR BLUNDERBy Alan BossFrom Astrobiology Magazine6 July 2005

These days, it is generally accepted within the scientific community that there are planets orbiting nearby stars. In the past decade, more than 130 such extrasolar planets have been discovered. But the first such "discovery," of a planet allegedly orbiting Barnard's star, turned out to be a false alarm. In a talk at a recent symposium on extrasolar planets, astronomer Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told the tale of this scientific snafu.

The extrasolar planets field started in many ways with Peter Van de Kamp. Van de Kamp had been a professor at the University of Virginia for several years. In 1937 he went to Swarthmore College and became director of the Sproul Observatory there. The next year he began a long-term search for very low-mass companions to stars. One of the first stars he put on the search program was a star called Barnard's star. Barnard's star is the second closest star system to our own. The only one closer to us is the Alpha Centauri triple

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system. Unfortunately, it's an M dwarf, so it can't be seen by the visible eye, but it can be easily seen with a small telescope.

SIM, scheduled for launch in 2009, will determine the positions and distances of stars several hundred times more accurately than any previous program. Image credit: NASA/JPL.

Van de Kamp started taking data on Barnard's star in 1938, and continued taking data for roughly 25 years. In 1963, he finally felt confident enough to present his first results. These were pretty excruciatingly difficult measurements. He and his colleagues were looking for variations of plus or minus 1 micron in the position of the star on a photographic plate. They were trying to measure the photo center of these little blurry dots on the photographic emulsions to 1 part in 100. They would have 10 people measure the same plates independently, and then try to average over whatever individual systematic errors they would introduce, to find the true photo center of the positions.

After looking at some 2400 plates, he found evidence that there was a bit of a wobble in Barnard's star, which fit with the curve that would result if Barnard's star was being orbited by a planet about 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter out at a distance of 4.4 AU. The odd thing about it was, though, that it didn't fit with a nice sine curve, which would indicate a roughly circular orbit, like Jupiter's, but it had a little bit of a cusp to it. So it was a somewhat eccentric orbit, but people thought, Well, maybe that's not so bad. This basically became the textbook example of an extrasolar planet. People had believed for a long time that extrasolar planets should exist, and this one became literally the textbook example.

But then about 10 years later, in 1973, along came George Gatewood. He had been doing his Ph.D. on astrometry at the University of Pittsburgh. He didn't really want to study Barnard's star, but some of his professors told him, Yeah, sure you're going to study Barnard's star. And so he was dragged into it. He did his own measurements, using different telescopes, the Allegheny Observatory's Thaw Refractor, as well as some plates taken from the Van Vleck Observatory. He only had 240 plates, but they were taken with completely different telescopes. For his thesis project, he set about to reduce those plates.

Instead of having them reduced by individuals sitting at a plate-measuring machine, though, they were reduced by a newfangled plate-measuring machine that the U.S. Naval Observatory had come up with. So it was done automatically. Equally importantly, they reduced the data with a different technique than what had been used before. His thesis adviser, Heinrich Eichhorn, was one of the fathers of analytical astrometry, and so they used Eichhorn's technique for the data analysis. In 1973 they were able to produce their results on Barnard's star. But they found that some of the points in which they had the most confidence did not fit the curve produced by Van de Kamp at all. So they very politely and gently said that they had found no evidence for the traditional planet that Peter van de Kamp thought he had evidence for.

Things got even worse for Barnard's star's planet that same year, because there was another paper published in Astronomical Journal by John Hershey, who was also working at the Swarthmore College Observatory. He had studied another star called Gliese 793, another low-mass M dwarf star, and he found

that, if he plotted the astrometric wobbles of Barnard's star and Gliese 793 together, both of them took a jump in one direction in 1949, and in 1957 took another jump in the other direction, implying that both of them either had exactly the same planet going around them, or else there was something else going on, namely some systematic errors.

Of course, that was what turned out to have been the case. In 1949, there had been a major change in the telescope, they put in a new cast-iron cell to hold the Swarthmore College refracting lens. They also changed the photographic emulsions they were using, which makes a big difference when you're trying to measure things to 1/100th of the size of a blur. And in 1957, they made a lens adjustment. So van de Kamp had tried to correct for all these things, but clearly the corrections were not sufficient. And so at that point, van de Kamp threw away his old data and started taking new data, and still continued to believe that Barnard's star should have a planet. But most people didn't believe it. This was 1973, and the field fell into a deep sleep at that point for 20 years.

Since then, the HST (Hubble Space Telescope) fine-guidance sensor team, led by Fritz Benedict, of the University of Texas, has been following Barnard's star to try to find whatever planets it has, and to my knowledge they have not found any signal yet. Instead, Barnard's star is more useful for debugging mechanical problems on HST, because when Barnard's star seems to wobble, it usually means that something's happened with HST.

Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1635.html.

MARS MORE ACTIVE AND COMPLEX THAN EXPECTEDBy Robert Roy BrittFrom Space.com6 July 2005

On the whole, Mars can seem rather boring. It is covered with basalt, the most basic type of rock, and generally appears to lack geologic diversity. It does not shake or rumble much. And then there's that red dust everywhere. But a closer look reveals pockets of rocks that rival the complexity of our own planet. The finding means Mars is more active beneath the surface than scientists realized.

"When you look at the geology in the right spots, there is as much diversity in the rocks as you see on Earth," said Philip Christensen, an Arizona State University professor and a top scientist on three different ongoing Mars missions.

The results of this and six other studies are detailed this week by the journal Nature. The studies draw from data collected by NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey spacecraft, as well as the two rovers on the ground.

Read the full article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050706_mars_diverse.html.

Journal references:M. P. Golombek, et al., 2005. Assessment of Mars Exploration Rover landing site predictions. Nature, 436(7047):44-48, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/abs/nature03600.html.

A. S. Yen, et al., 2005. An integrated view of the chemistry and mineralogy of martian soils. Nature, 436(7047):49-54, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/abs/nature03637.html.

J. F. Bell, et al., 2005. Solar eclipses of Phobos and Deimos observed from the surface of Mars. Nature, 436(7047):55-57, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/abs/nature03437.html.

R. Sullivan, et al., 2005. Aeolian processes at the Mars Exploration Rover Meridiani Planum landing site. Nature, 436(7047):58-61, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/abs/nature03641.html.

W. Goetz, et al., 2005. Indication of drier periods on Mars from the chemistry and mineralogy of atmospheric dust. Nature, 436(7047):62-65, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/abs/nature03807.html.

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L. A. Haskin, et al., 2005. Water alteration of rocks and soils on Mars at the Spirit rover site in Gusev crater. Nature, 436(7047):66-69, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/abs/nature03640.html.

PAPER SAYS EDIBLE MEAT CAN BE GROWN IN A LAB ON INDUSTRIAL SCALEUniversity of Maryland release6 July 2005

Experiments for NASA space missions have shown that small amounts of edible meat can be created in a lab. But the technology that could grow chicken nuggets without the chicken, on a large scale, may not be just a science fiction fantasy. In a paper in the June 29 issue of Tissue Engineering, a team of scientists, including University of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny, propose two new techniques of tissue engineering that may one day lead to affordable production of in vitro—lab grown—meat for human consumption. It is the first peer-reviewed discussion of the prospects for industrial production of cultured meat.

Cultured muscle tissue could be used in place of traditionally-farmed meat products.

"There would be a lot of benefits from cultured meat," says Matheny, who studies agricultural economics and public health. "For one thing, you could control the nutrients. For example, most meats are high in the fatty acid Omega-6, which can cause high cholesterol and other health problems. With in vitro meat, you could replace that with Omega-3, which is a healthy fat. Cultured meat could also reduce the pollution that results from raising livestock, and you wouldn't need the drugs that are used on animals raised for meat."

Prime without the rib

The idea of culturing meat is to create an edible product that tastes like cuts of beef, poultry, pork, lamb or fish and has the nutrients and texture of meat. Scientists know that a single muscle cell from a cow or chicken can be isolated and divided into thousands of new muscle cells. Experiments with fish tissue have created small amounts of in vitro meat in NASA experiments researching potential food products for long-term space travel, where storage is a problem.

"But that was a single experiment and was geared toward a special situation—space travel," says Matheny. "We need a different approach for large scale production."

Matheny's team developed ideas for two techniques that have potential for large scale meat production. One is to grow the cells in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets of meat would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked on top of one another to increase thickness. The other method would be to grow the muscle cells on small three-dimensional beads that stretch with small changes in temperature. The mature cells could then be harvested and turned into a processed meat, like nuggets or hamburgers.

Treadmill meat

To grow meat on a large scale, cells from several different kinds of tissue, including muscle and fat, would be needed to give the meat the texture to appeal to the human palate.

"The challenge is getting the texture right," says Matheny. "We have to figure out how to 'exercise' the muscle cells. For the right texture, you have to stretch the tissue, like a live animal would."

Where's the beef?

And, the authors agree, it might take work to convince consumers to eat cultured muscle meat, a product not yet associated with being produced artificially.

"On the other hand, cultured meat could appeal to people concerned about food safety, the environment and animal welfare, and people who want to tailor food to their individual tastes," says Matheny. The paper even suggests that meat makers may one day sit next to bread makers on the kitchen counter.

"The benefits could be enormous," Matheny says. "The demand for meat is increasing world wide—China's meat demand is doubling every ten years. Poultry consumption in India has doubled in the last five years. With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world's annual meat supply. And you could do it in a way that's better for the environment and human health. In the long term, this is a very feasible idea."

Matheny saw so many advantages in the idea that he joined several other scientists in starting a nonprofit, New Harvest, to advance the technology. One of these scientists, Henk Haagsman, Professor of Meat Science at Utrecht University, received a grant from the Dutch government to produce cultured meat, as part of a national initiative to reduce the environmental impact of food production.

Other authors of the paper are Pieter Edelman of Wageningen University, Netherlands; Douglas McFarland, South Dakota State University; and Vladimir Mironov, Medical University of South Carolina.

To request a copy of the paper contact contact Larry Bernstein, Tissue Engineering, lbernstein@liebertpub.com. For more information on cultured meat, see the New Harvest web site, http://www.new-harvest.org.

Journal reference:P. D. Edelman, D. C. McFarland, V. A. Mironov and J. G. Matheny, 2005. Commentary: In vitro-cultured meat production. Tissue Engineering, 11(5-6):659-662, http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ten.2005.11.659.

Contact:Ellen TernesPhone: 301-405-4627E-mail: eternes@umd.edu

Read the original news release at http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=1098.

An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/artificial_meat_grown.html.

AN EARTHLY VIEW OF MARSBy Dale AndersonFrom Space.com7 July 2005

It was Valentine's Day, 1990 when a sleeping eye awoke after nearly nine year's of inactivity, and for a few brief moments, from a distance of nearly four billion miles, took its last look at the cosmic neighborhood from whence it came. Voyager 1, now the most distant human made object from Earth, sent back an image now known as "the Pale Blue Dot." Astronomer and exobiologist Carl Sagan eloquently reminded us that this small, inconsequential speck amidst the cosmic background is home to everyone, every idea, and every plant, animal or microbe that has ever existed on our planet. And so far, this small, pale blue dot is the only place in the universe that we are certain has life.

I was kneeling at a depth of 120 feet in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica awaiting the arrival of my buddy, a telepresent ROV, that was being driven from a console at NASA's Ames Research Center over 10,000 miles away. It had been lowered into the water via a dive hole that had been made through the eight feet of sea ice above us. As I watched the graceful robotic device dropping through the column of clear, dark water, I noticed that the somewhat

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distant dive hole appeared as a small, pale blue dot against the darker ice that surrounded it.

Recalling the image of Earth taken at the edge of our solar system, I wondered if this is what it would be like to view the Earth, or another Earth-like planet, from the vantage point of Voyager several years earlier. In the years that had I worked and dived in the oceans and lakes of Antarctica, I had never thought about the dive hole quite this way, but there it was, like a painting or postcard sent to me by Voyager.

Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/050707_seti_thursday.html.

THE MARTIAN HEAT SIGNATUREBased on an ASU reportFrom Astrobiology Magazine7 July 2005

Mars is a rocky planet with an ancient volcanic past, but new findings show the planet is more complex and active than previously believed - at least in certain places. Finding those places, however, turns out to be trickier than just looking at landforms like river valleys or lakebeds or searching for specific minerals.

Layered martian bedrock. Image credit: NASA/JPL.

"Context is everything," said Philip Christensen, Principal Investigator for the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) on Mars Global Surveyor and for the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on Mars Odyssey, as well as lead scientist for the Mini-TES instruments on the Mars Exploration Rovers. "There has been a lot of excitement about finding specific features or minerals, but THEMIS, together with the TES infrared spectrometer, is giving us an overview by finding all the minerals. It gives us context—the underlying geology of the place."

A paper led by Christensen, to be released online by the journal, Nature, on July 6, describes how a detailed examination of the Red Planet's surface minerals using THEMIS and TES data yields surprising results in certain localized areas.

While the current rover missions have largely proved that in the distant past Mars may have had a lake or two, several different orbital mapping missions have found a basalt-rich planet that is the product of an ancient volcanic history. Geologically, it seems like a simple planet in the large scale—but then there are local windows showing far more complexity.

"From what we have seen to date, you might imagine going to Mars and seeing nothing but basalt," said Christensen. "The evidence has always shown that the planet was active early, made some big volcanoes and then shut down and that was that. But when we looked more carefully we saw that there are these other places…When you look at the geology in the right spots, there is as much diversity in the rocks as you see on Earth."

"Once you get a glimpse of this complexity, you realize that there is a very complex world underneath that veneer of basalt."

What Christensen and team found were localized deposits showing a distribution of igneous mineral types rivaling the range of minerals found on Earth—from primitive volcanic rocks like olivine-rich basalts to highly processed silica-rich rocks like granites. The diversity of igneous minerals is important, Christensen explains, because it implies that the surface rocks have continued to be processed and reconstituted multiple times over an extended period of time.

"You melt the mantle and you get olivine basalts; you melt them again and you get basalt; you melt that and you make andesite; you melt that and you make dacite; you melt that and you make granite," said Christensen. "Every time you re-melt a rock, the first thing to come off is the silica, so each time you melt it, you're refining the silica."

An illustration of the 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft with labeled components. Image credit: NASA.

On Earth, such mineral evolution generally occurs as primitive volcanic rocks get folded back into the planet's crust, re-melted and refined as faster melting components like silica separate out of the original material—a process known as mineral fractionation. Mars, unlike Earth, does not have moving plates recycling the planet's crust. However, Christensen's results show that, like Earth, Mars has evolved and may still be evolving beneath the surface.

"Mars is a more complicated planet than we thought—the geology has kept chugging along and evolving over time," Christensen said. "Though they're not widespread, we've found dacite, and we've found granite. One way to make these granites is to make a whole volcano stacked up out of basalt—it gets tall enough and you begin to remelt the stuff deep down, and when you remelt the basalt, you can have granites forming."

"These are fairly small occurrences. On Earth, we have mountain ranges made of granite, on Mars we have so far only found a couple of globs. It's not like the Earth in the extent of this geological evolution, but Mars is like the Earth in localized situations. It's been hidden from us, but it's a sophisticated, evolving planet after all," he said.

Left: Vertical slice through bedrock at Meridiani shows evidence for layering. Spirit's Adirondack rock, right, an early science target. Image credits: NASA/JPL.

Because the areas where the evolved igneous rocks occur are small, it has taken the high-resolution multispectral camera in Mars Odyssey's THEMIS instrument (with a resolution of 100 meters) to find the minerals from orbit by finding a specific infrared signature in specific landforms. THEMIS's mineral mapping has been 1500 times more detailed than TES's, though the TES instrument's infrared spectrometer (with a resolution of 3 kilometers) detects a much more detailed range of infrared emissions, making it more sensitive to different mineral compositions.

"We're doing the thing that we set out to do: mapping the composition at mesoscales," Christensen noted. "THEMIS identifies the area, then we go back and find what may be just a single, over-looked TES pixel and analyze it. The two were really planned to work together and that's exactly what we've been doing. We use these two instruments in a synergistic way and together they're perfect."

Though Mars mapping has been going on for many years, Christensen notes that some of the most interesting places on the planet have yet to be identified and explored.

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"If you drained the Earth's oceans and looked at it from space, you would probably reach the same conclusion—a quiet, basaltic planet," he said. "But then, if you searched carefully, you might find Yellowstone and realize that there was a lot going on below the surface of the planet that you weren't aware of. We're at that stage now in looking at Mars."

Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1636.html.

BEWARE THE MARS HOAX: EARTH AND MARS ARE CONVERGING FOR A CLOSE ENCOUNTER, BUT NOT AS CLOSE AS SOME PEOPLE THINKBy Tony PhillipsFrom NASA Science News7 July 2005

There's a rumor going around. You might have heard it at a 4th of July BBQ or family get-together. More likely you've read it on the Internet. It goes like this:

"The Red Planet is about to be spectacular."

"Earth is catching up with Mars [for] the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history."

"On August 27th... Mars will look as large as the full moon."

And finally, "No one alive today will ever see this again!"

Those are snippets from a widely-circulated email. Only the first sentence is true. The Red Planet is about to be spectacular. The rest is a hoax. Here are the facts: Earth and Mars are converging for a close encounter this year on October 30th at 0319 Universal Time. Distance: 69 million kilometers. To the unaided eye, Mars will look like a bright red star, a pinprick of light, certainly not as wide as the full Moon.

Disappointed? Don't be. If Mars did come close enough to rival the Moon, its gravity would alter Earth's orbit and raise terrible tides. Sixty-nine million km is good. At that distance, Mars shines brighter than anything else in the sky except the Sun, the Moon and Venus. The visual magnitude of Mars on October 30, 2005, will be -2.3. Even inattentive sky watchers will notice it, rising at sundown and soaring overhead at midnight.

You might remember another encounter with Mars, about two years ago, on August 27, 2003. That was the closest in recorded history, by a whisker, and millions of people watched as the distance between Mars and Earth shrunk to 56 million km. This October's encounter, at 69 million km, is similar. To casual observers, Mars will seem about as bright and beautiful in 2005 as it was in 2003.

Although closest approach is still months away, Mars is already conspicuous in the early morning. Before the sun comes up, it's the brightest object in the eastern sky, really eye-catching. If you have a telescope, even a small one, point it at Mars. You can see the bright icy South Polar Cap and strange dark markings on the planet's surface.

One day people will walk among those dark markings, exploring and prospecting, possibly mining ice from the polar caps to supply their settlements. It's a key goal of NASA's Vision for Space Exploration: to return to the Moon, to visit Mars and to go beyond.

Every day the view improves. Mars is coming—and that's no hoax.

Read the original article at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/07jul_marshoax.htm.

THE ONE-AND-A-HALF PERCENT SOLUTIONBy Alan BossFrom Astrobiology Magazine11 July 2005

More than 130 extrasolar planets have been discovered to date. Most of these have been found using a technique that measures tiny changes in a star's radial velocity, the speed of its motion relative to Earth. In a talk at a recent symposium on extrasolar planets, astronomer Alan Boss, of the Carnegie

Institution of Washington, presented this overview of the difficult measurements—and the profound discoveries—made by planet-hunters using the radial-velocity technique.

A dip in brightness occurs as a prospective planet transits in front of its parent star. Image credit: ESO.

In 1991, Michel Mayor and Antoine Duquennoy published a classic survey of binary stars in our solar neighborhood. They found all the binary companions that they could, but there were another 200 or so G-type stars that didn't seem to have any binary companions. Subsequently, Michel Mayor, along with Didier Queloz, decided to look at these 200-odd stars, potential solar analogs, to see if they had planetary systems. The technique they used involved looking for stellar wobbles, cyclical changes in the stars' radial velocity, induced by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets.

In the spring of 1994, they installed a new spectrometer on their telescope at the Haute Provence Observatory, ELODIE, which had a resolution of about 13 meters per second. This was just about the right level to be able to see the velocity wobble, the Doppler wobble, induced in the Sun by a Jupiter-like planet. By the end of 1994 they had noticed a very interesting wobble in a star called 51 Peg.

Unfortunately, 51 Peg at that point was getting closer and closer to the Sun and couldn't be observed, so they had to take a 6-month sabbatical, and come back in the summer of 1995 and start looking at 51 Peg again. They had an 8-night observing run at the Haute Provence Observatory, and by the end of that observing run, they were ready to go to Nature and publish.

The curve they produced fit a model of 51 Peg, a solar-type star, being orbited by a planet with roughly a half of a Jupiter mass, on a nice, circular orbit. The only problem was that the object had an orbital period of 4.23 days. It was orbiting in at about 0.05 AU, nowhere near where people had been expecting to find Jupiter-mass planets. So it was a bit of a puzzle. But it was clear early on that this had to be a planet, which perhaps had formed farther out and migrated in. That was the only way to explain how it could exist at that location.

The next step was to see if anyone else could reproduce the result. Because, of course, the critical problem with the planet around Barnard's star was that no one could confirm it. There were several other planet-hunting efforts underway at the time in 1995, but the folks who got to the telescope first were Paul Butler and Geoff Marcy. They were able to confirm 51 Peg's planet, with even smaller scatter than the original discovery measurements.

We realized at this point that the field of extrasolar planets had truly been born. In October 1995 a new era was entered, where we actually had convincing, solid proof of the existence of extrasolar planets around normal stars.

Now Geoff and Paul had been working in this field for many years. They had actually started seriously around 1987, and so they had a lot of data ready to

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analyze. They immediately began to reduce all of their data, looking for short period orbits, took some more measurements, and by January of 1996, they were able to announce a couple more planets. One of them, 47 UMa b, was considerably more reassuring a planet than the one discovered orbiting 51 Peg. It was roughly a 2 or 3 Jupiter-mass object orbiting at a distance of 2 or so AU, more like what we were expecting to find based on the planets in our own solar system. We now know that this is a multiple-planet system, but at the time they fit it with a single Keplerian orbit.

Estimates suggest that up to a quarter of all stars have planets. Image credit: NASA/STScI/ESA

Almost all of the known extrasolar planets have been found using this radial-velocity technique; roughly 117 planets have been discovered that way. But there's another way of finding planets, transit detection. The first transit detection was achieved by David Charboneau and colleagues and separately by Greg Henry and colleagues in 2000. This was a planet which had been found originally by radial velocity, but then these other researchers went on and did both ground-based and later Hubble photometry of the host star and found a really wonderful light curve, indicative of the planet passing in front of the star, dimming its light slightly. The initial detection by Charbonneau's team was done, believe it or not, using a 4-inch telescope in a parking lot in Boulder, Colorado.

The dip in the star's light amplitude is about 1.5 percent, so it's truly amazing that this very first transit detection could have been made by a good amateur telescope. When HST went back and re-did the photometry with much higher precision, it produced an incredibly beautiful light curve, which is so precise you could use it to try to search for moons around the planet and place limits on how large they could be.

So transits are now coming into their own. I think they're the second leading way of finding planets. Six planets have been discovered by transits now.

Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1640.html.

NEW EARTH AND LIFE STUDIES WEB SITENational Academies release8 July 2005

The National Academies' Division on Earth and Life Studies has launched a redesigned Web site, which offers easier access to activities, news, and research highlights. View it at http://dels.nas.edu/dels/.

NASA AMES FAMILY NIGHT HOMES IN ON COMET IMPACTSNASA/ARC media advisory 05-40AR11 July 2005

NASA Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley, will host "Cosmic Impacts," the second installment in its highly successful Family Night Education Series, on Saturday, July 16, 2005. The event features exhibits and hands-on activities for the entire family, presentations by NASA experts, and 'galaxy viewing' where the public can see the moon, planets and other celestial objects through a field of telescopes (weather permitting). Media representatives are invited to attend the event.

"Cosmic Impacts" is free and open to the public. The doors of the NASA Exploration Center open at 6:00 PM PDT and will remain open until 10:00 PM. Telescope viewing will continue until 11:00 PM PDT. To reach NASA Ames, exit at Moffett Boulevard from U.S. Highway 101. Turn right over the overpass and follow the parking signs.

Schedule of events

6:00-10:00 PM PDTNASA Exploration CenterFamily exhibits and activities

7:00 PM PDTScott Sandford, NASA research astrophysicistPresenting the latest images and results from the Deep Impact mission's July 4 rendezvous and impact with the comet Tempel 1.David Morrison, senior scientist, NASA Astrobiology InstitutePresenting NASA's efforts to locate and identify near-Earth asteroids that could pose an impact hazard to the Earth.Rusty Schweickart, Apollo 9 astronautPresenting the B612 Foundation's innovative and exciting plans to demonstrate how impact hazards to the Earth could be addressed by changing the orbit of an asteroid.

8:30-11:00 PM PDTGalaxy ViewingJoin local amateur astronomers to view the impact craters on the moon and other celestial bodies.

Ames Family Nights are sponsored by the NASA Ames Education Office and are designed to engage the community in scientific exploration and to inform the public about NASA research and technology. For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/. For more information about the NASA Ames Education Office, visit http://quest.nasa.gov.

Contacts:Nick Veronico or Jonas DinoNASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CAPhone: 650-604-1939 or 650-604-9000E-mail: nveronico@mail.arc.nasa.gov or jonas.dino@nasa.gov

CASSINI UPDATESNASA/JPL releases

Cassini Significant Events for 23-28 June 2005NASA/JPL release, 1 July 2005

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired Wednesday from the Goldstone tracking stations. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. Information on the present position and speed of the Cassini spacecraft may be found on the "Present Position" web page located at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/present-position.cfm.

The entire suite of Magnetospheric and Plasma Science (MAPS) instruments conducted surveys to measure the properties of interactions between Titan and its torus. Measurements included the composition, density, spatial, and temporal variation in the torus region when Titan is not close by and perturbing it. The Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument (MIMI) imaged the dynamics of the inner magnetosphere, and the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) mapped Titan to obtain measurements of nitriles, hydrocarbons, and carbon dioxide as a function of latitude and emission angle.

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At this time the Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument is on a campaign to obtain the highest resolution observations of Saturn Electrostatic Discharges (SED) within a distance of 6 Saturn radii. Results will help to verify the source as lightning, or provide evidence that the SEDs could be of some other origin such as Saturn's rings. The fourth of eight Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) occultation observations occurred this week. Skip ahead to June 26 for specific details of that and other science events for that day.

Thursday, June 23 (DOY 174):

The live movable block mini-sequence was uplinked today over the Goldstone tracking complex. Confirmation has been received from the spacecraft that the program has registered properly on board. The mini-sequence will begin execution on Sunday, June 26. A member of the Spacecraft Operations Office (SCO) gave a Cassini talk to 30 members of the Altadena Rotary Club in Altadena, California.

Friday, June 24 (DOY 175):

Delivery Coordination Meetings were held today for Navigation Software T2, and Maneuver Automation Software (MAS) version 5. This version of Navigation Software includes the move to Red Hat 8.0 & Enterprise 4 Linux, MAS/MOPS changes, multi-mission changes and new utilities. The MAS release provides needed capabilities to support current and future OTMs. The S12 Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation 1 sequence change request approval meeting was held today.

A command to enable RPWS Sounder Operations was uplinked to the spacecraft. Sounder operations were confirmed to have begun around 17:50 Spacecraft Event Time (SCET), about a one-way light time after the command was sent.

RSS personnel participated in an Occultation Operational Readiness Test (ORT) today. This is the last test prior to the occultation observations that will occur on Sunday.

Sunday, June 26 (DOY 177):

Today there were non-targeted flybys of Tethys, Pan, and Telesto. The RSS Saturn/Rings Ingress and Egress occultation completed successfully this evening. The occultation occurred over three antennas at the Goldstone DSN complex and was the fourth of eight occultation observation periods planned between May and September.

This was one of the best diametric occultations primarily because of the high elevation angles at the tracking station leading to better Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) and less perturbations of the signal phase by Earth's atmosphere. In addition, the occultation was entirely covered by what's considered to be the best Ka-band receiving antenna, DSS-25, for both ingress and egress. Based on real-time monitoring of signal levels, the limb track maneuver seemed to have executed well. This will be verified once the team receives the ACS reconstructed C-Kernel.

This view shows Saturn's Encke Gap (325 kilometers, or 200 miles wide) whose center is 133,590 kilometers (83,010 miles) from Saturn. This division in the rings is home to the small moon called Pan (20 kilometers, or 12 miles across). Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Additional observations included RPWS measurements at the Ring Plane Crossing to determine the equatorial dust flux and scale height as a function of radial distance, while also obtaining high-resolution measurements of plasma waves at the magnetic equator. The Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) obtained an ansa movie of the outer B ring edge and performed an azimuthal scan of the Cassini Division and Encke Gap, and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) obtained a high-resolution radial profile of the B ring optical depth by making measurements of the star 26 Tau as it passed behind the B Ring. Finally, all the Optical Remote Sensing instruments performed joint studies of the rings at zero phase angle.

Monday, June 27 (DOY 178):

The main engine cover was successfully opened in preparation for Orbital Trim Maneuver (OTM) 25. The cover has been closed since April 30. SCO also performed an Attitude Control System reaction wheel bias.

Commands were sent to the spacecraft by Uplink Operations to set up and perform the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) S12 instrument expanded block SSR load #2, to clean up after this operation, and to disable RPWS Sounder Operations. RSS performed a Saturn Gravity Science experiment today.

Saturn's moon Mimas, whose low density suggests that it is primarily composed of ice, has a flattened or oblate shape reminiscent of Saturn's. The moon's equatorial dimension is nearly 10 percent larger than the polar one due to the satellite's rapid rotation. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

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Tuesday, June 28 (DOY 179):

A Planetary Data System archive peer review was held for the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) and RADAR instruments. The review went well with only minor liens identified. Archive software interface specification documents for the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA), INMS and RADAR are in the signature cycle.

A press release is now available regarding the lake-like feature recently observed on Saturn's moon Titan. Cassini captured a series of images, released today, showing a marking, darker than anything else around it. It is remarkably lake-like, with smooth, shore-like boundaries unlike any seen previously on Titan. The site has been identified as the best candidate seen so far for a liquid hydrocarbon lake on Titan. For more information link to http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Instrument Operations successfully completed analyzing the results of the ISS flight software (FSW) checkout performed on June 14. A sequence to permanently switch to FSW version 1.4 has been built, reviewed and approved. Negotiations are underway to upload it in early July in time to be used for the Enceladus encounter.

Cassini Significant Events for 29 June - 6 July 2005NASA/JPL release, 8 July 2005

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired Wednesday, July 6, from the Goldstone tracking stations. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. Information on the present position and speed of the Cassini spacecraft may be found on the "Present Position" web page located at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/present-position.cfm.

This sweeping view of Saturn's rings offers a look at how the planet's moons help shape and maintain this structure, making Saturn the jewel of the solar system. Some of the bright lanes seen here within the main rings are due to resonances with moons such as Mimas, Janus and Prometheus, whose gravity nudges the orbits of the ring particles. These resonances can also cause dark gaps in the rings, like the Cassini Division. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

The entire suite of Magnetospheric and Plasma Science (MAPS) instruments, which include the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS), Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA), Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS), Magnetometer Subsystem (MAG), Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument (MIMI) and Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS), continued to perform simultaneous low-rate outer magnetospheric surveys in order to observe the variability of magnetospheric boundaries at several geometrically similar apoapses. In addition, CAPS observed the dawn-side/dusk-side magnetospheric boundaries at a variety of radial distances and latitudes.

Optical Remote Sensing science included Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) observations of many small moons for orbit determination, ISS acquisition of data for a variety of movies of Saturn's southern hemisphere, and Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) infrared mappings of Saturn's upper troposphere and tropopause to determine its thermal properties.

Wednesday, June 29 (DOY 180):

A sub-sequence generation sequence change request approval meeting was held today as part of development for S14. Of the twenty-three changes submitted, seventeen were approved, four withdrawn, one disapproved, and one remains pending.

A Cassini team member from University College London gave a seminar on ground-based Cassini support with infrared observations of Saturn's aurora. Using high-resolution spectra, the ion winds and emission are measured, showing the effects on the ionosphere caused by interactions between Saturn's magnetosphere and the solar wind. These observations are used to place the space conditions around Cassini into a broader context.

Thursday, June 30 (DOY 181):

The Titan Atmospheric Model Working Group met today. The group is re-thinking the Titan T-7 minimum flyby altitude. The group will reconvene on July 12 and finalize a recommendation to Program Management.

Uplink Operations sent commands to the spacecraft to send the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument expanded block file direct to the instrument, to power cycle MAG, and to power-on CAPS. The preliminary port for S15 occurred as part of the Science Operations Plan update process. The products were merged and reports published for the team to review. The official port is scheduled for Friday, July 8.

Cassini outreach has initiated a photo contest to celebrate the first anniversary of Cassini-Huygens' successful Saturn orbit insertion on June 30, 2004. The contest is open to the public and flight team members. Voting has now begun and will continue through 5:00 PM (PDT) Monday, July 11. The most popular image will be announced on Tuesday July 12. To vote, link to the Cassini web site. As of Tuesday July 5, over 20,000 people had cast their votes!

Friday, July 1 (DOY 182):

Last week it was reported that ISS would be switching to their new flight software version 1.4 sometime in early July. ISS has now elected to defer the permanent switch to the new software until after the Enceladus fly-by to minimize risk to the encounter observations.

Tuesday, July 5 (DOY 186):

All participating teams delivered detailed subsequence files as part of sequence development for S14. The sequence leads will now take these files and merge them to produce a preliminary integrated sequence for the teams to review.

Wednesday, July 6 (DOY 187):

Members of the Navigation Team presented three trajectory options for raising the Titan flyby T7 altitude in response to the Titan Atmospheric Model Working Group meeting. No decisions have been made yet as to whether the T7 altitude will be changed. The S17 Aftermarket Process assessment meeting was held to review all of the requested changes to the sequence. It looks like all of the changes will fit within available resources. Unless the Target Working Teams and Orbiter Science Teams recommendations change over the next couple of weeks, it is likely that the Decision meeting scheduled in two weeks will be canceled.

The first official Cassini archive delivery to the Planetary Data System(PDS) occurred on July 1. The delivery contains science data from Launch(1997-288) through Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) +3 months (2004-275).

The following teams have delivered 100% of their required data:INMS, ISS, MAG, MIMI, RADAR, RPWS, VIMS, and NAIF (Spacecraft, Planet, Instruments, C-matrix, and Events kernels). These data are available on-line from PDS, with the exception of RADAR data that should be on-line

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soon. The remaining teams have made partial deliveries and are making substantial progress toward achieving 100%.

Saturn's moon Rhea displays two large impact features here, along the terminator (the boundary between day and night), plus a superb rayed crater to the east. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across. The northern basin, named Tirawa, was discovered in Voyager images. This ancient impact site is approximately 360 kilometers (220 miles) across. Another, perhaps larger basin sits to the south of Tirawa and is partly in shadow. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

To subscribe to PDS release announcement of data, please use the following link, http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/subscription_service/index.cfm. To download Cassini datasets from PDS, use the following link, http://starbrite.jpl.nasa.gov/pds/index.jsp.

Check out the Cassini web site at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov for the latest press releases and images.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter.

DEEP IMPACT UPDATESMultiple agencies' releases

Deep Impact Status ReportNASA/JPL release 2005-108, 3 July 2005

One hundred and seventy-one days into its 172-day journey to comet Tempel 1, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully released its impactor at 11:07 PM Saturday, Pacific Daylight Time (2:07 AM Sunday, Eastern Daylight Time). At release, the impactor was about 880,000 kilometers (547,000 miles) away from its quarry. The separation of flyby spacecraft and the washing-machine-sized, copper-fortified impactor is one in a series of important mission milestones that will cap off with a planned encounter with the comet at 10:52 PM Sunday, PDT (1:52 AM on July 4, EDT). Six hours prior to impactor release, the Deep Impact spacecraft successfully performed its fourth trajectory correction maneuver. The 30-second burn changed the spacecraft's velocity by about one kilometer per hour (less than one mile per hour). The goal of the burn is to place the impactor as close as possible to the direct path of onrushing comet Tempel 1.

This image of Deep Impact's impactor probe was taken by the mission's mother ship, or flyby spacecraft, after the two separated at 11:07 PM Pacific time, July 2 (2:07 AM Eastern time, July 3). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD.

Soon after the trajectory maneuver was completed, the impactor engineers began the final steps that would lead to it being ready for free flight. The plan culminated with activation of the impactor's batteries at 10:12 PM, PDT (1:12 AM Sunday, EDT). Deep Impact's impactor has no solar cells; the vehicle's batteries are expected to provide all the power required for its short day-long life. In order to release the impactor, separation pyros fired allowing a spring to uncoil and separate the two spacecraft at a speed of about 35 centimeters per second (0.78 mile per hour).

These water maps of Tempel 1 show the location of water molecules around the comet. Each image corresponds to a different time interval—two before a comet outburst (left), one near the peak of an outburst (middle), and one after the outburst (right). The outward motion of the water during the outburst can be seen. The images were created by combining the spectral signal of water observed across the comet by Deep Impact's infrared spectrometer. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD/SAIC.

With Tempel 1 closing the distance between it and impactor at about 10 kilometers (6 miles) per second, there is little time for mission controllers to admire their work. Twelve minutes after impactor release, the flyby began a 14-minute long divert burn that slowed its velocity relative to the impactor by 102 meters per second (227 miles per hour), moving it out of the path of the

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onrushing comet nucleus and setting the stage for a ringside seat of celestial fireworks to come less than 24 hours later.

Deep Impact mission controllers have confirmed the impactor's S-band antenna is talking to the flyby spacecraft. All impactor data including the expected remarkable images of its final dive into the comet's nucleus will be transmitted to the flyby craft—which will then downlink them to Deep Space Network antennas that are listening 134 million kilometers (83 million miles) away. While all is going as expected on the Deep Impact spacecraft the comet itself is putting on something of a show. The 14-kilometer-long (8.7-mile-long) comet Tempel 1 displayed another cometary outburst on July 2 at 1:34 AM PDT (4:34 AM EDT) when a massive, short-lived blast of ice or other particles escaped from inside the comet's nucleus and temporarily expanded the size and reflectivity of the cloud of dust and gas (coma) that surrounds it. The July 2 outburst is the fourth observed in the past three weeks. Three of the outbursts appear to have originated from the same area on the surface of the nucleus but they do not occur every time that that area faces the Sun. "The comet is definitely full of surprises so far and probably has a few more in store for us," said Deep Impact Project Manager Rick Grammier of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "None of this overly concerns us nor has it forced us to modify our nominal mission plan."

Deep Impact Kicks Off Fourth of July with Deep Space FireworksNASA/JPL release 2005-109, 4 July 2005

This image shows the view from Deep Impact's probe 90 seconds before it was pummeled by comet Tempel 1. The image was taken by the probe's impactor targeting sensor. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD.

After 172 days and 431 million kilometers (268 million miles) of deep space stalking, Deep Impact successfully reached out and touched comet Tempel 1. The collision between the coffee table-sized impactor and city-sized comet occurred at 1:52 AM EDT.

"What a way to kick off America's Independence Day," said Deep Impact Project Manager Rick Grammier of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "The challenges of this mission and teamwork that went into making it a success, should make all of us very proud."

"This mission is truly a smashing success," said Andy Dantzler, director of NASA's Solar System Division. "Tomorrow and in the days ahead we will know a lot more about the origins of our solar system."

Official word of the impact came 5 minutes after impact. At 1:57 AM EDT, an image from the spacecraft's medium resolution camera downlinked to the computer screens of the mission's science team showed the tell-tale signs of a high-speed impact.

This image shows the initial ejecta that resulted when NASA's Deep Impact probe collided with comet Tempel 1 at 10:52 pm Pacific time, July 3 (1:52 AM Eastern time, July 4). It was taken by the spacecraft's medium-resolution camera 16 seconds after impact. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD.

"The image clearly shows a spectacular impact," said Deep Impact principal investigator Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, College Park. "With this much data we have a long night ahead of us, but that is what we were hoping for. There is so much here it is difficult to know where to begin."

The celestial collision and ensuing data collection by the nearby Deep Impact mothership was the climax of a very active 24 hour period for the mission which began with impactor release at 2:07 AM EDT on July 3. Deep space maneuvers by the flyby, final checkout of both spacecraft and comet imaging took up most of the next 22 hours. Then, the impactor got down to its last two hours of life. "The impactor kicked into its autonomous navigation mode right on time," said Deep Impact navigator Shyam Bhaskaran, of JPL. "Our preliminary analysis indicates the three impactor targeting maneuvers occurred on time at 90, 35 and 12.5 minutes before impact."

At the moment the impactor was vaporizing itself in its 10 kilometers per second (6.3 miles per second) collision with comet Tempel 1, the Deep Impact flyby spacecraft was monitoring events from nearby. For the following 14 minutes, the flyby collected and downlinked data as the comet loomed ever closer. Then, as expected at 2:05 AM EDT, the flyby stopped collecting data and entered a defensive posture called shield mode where its dust shields protect the spacecraft's vital components during its closest passage through the comet's inner coma. Shield mode ended at 2:32 AM EDT when mission control re-established the link with the flyby spacecraft.

"The flyby surviving closest approach and shield mode has put the cap on an outstanding day," said Grammier. "Soon, we will begin the process of downlinking all the encounter information in one batch and hand it to the science team."

NASA's Deep Impact Generates Its Own Spectacular Photo FlashNASA/JPL release 2005-110, 4 July 2005

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The hyper-speed demise of NASA's Deep Impact probe generated an immense flash of light, which provided an excellent light source for the two cameras on the Deep Impact mothership. Deep Impact scientists theorize the 820-pound impactor vaporized deep below the comet's surface when the two collided at 1:52 AM July 4, at a speed of about 10 kilometers per second (6.3 miles per second or 23,000 miles per hour). "You can not help but get a big flash when objects meet at 23,000 miles per hour," said Deep Impact co-investigator Dr. Pete Schultz of Brown University, Providence, RI. "The heat produced by impact was at least several thousand degrees Kelvin and at that extreme temperature just about any material begins to glow. Essentially, we generated our own incandescent photo flash for less than a second."

This image shows the view from Deep Impact's flyby spacecraft as it turned back to look at comet Tempel 1. Fifty minutes earlier, the spacecraft's probe was run over by the comet. That collision kicked up plumes of ejected material, seen here streaming away from the back side of the comet. This image was taken by the flyby craft's high-resolution camera. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD.

The flash created by the impact was just one of the visual surprises that confronted the Deep Impact team. Preliminary assessment of the images and data downlinked from the flyby spacecraft have provided an amazing glimpse into the life of a comet. "They say a picture can speak a thousand words," said Deep Impact Project Manager Rick Grammier of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "But when you take a look at some of the ones we captured in the early morning hours of July 4, 2005 I think you can write a whole encyclopedia." At a news conference held later on July 4, Deep Impact team members displayed a movie depicting the final moments of the impactor's life.The final image from the impactor was transmitted from the short-lived probe three seconds before it met its fiery end. "The final image was taken from a distance of about 30 kilometers(18.6 miles) from the comet's surface," said Deep Impact Principal Investigator Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, College Park. "From that close distance we can resolve features on the surface that are less than 4 meters (about 13 feet) across. When I signed on for this mission I wanted to get a close-up look at a comet, but this is ridiculous—in a great way." The Deep Impact scientists are not the only ones taking a close look at their collected data. The mission's flight controller team is analyzing the impactor's final hours of flight. When the real-time telemetry came in after the

impactor's first rocket firing, it showed the impactor moving away from the comet's path. "It is fair to say we were monitoring the flight path of the impactor pretty closely," said Deep Impact navigator Shyam Bhaskaran of JPL. "Due to the flight software program, this initial maneuver moved us seven kilometers off course. This was not unexpected but at the same time not something we hoped to see. But then the second and third maneuvers put us right where we wanted to be."

Hubble Captures Deep Impact's Collision with CometJohns Hopkins University release, 4 July 2005

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured the dramatic effects of the collision early July 4 between comet 9P/Tempel 1 and an 820-pound projectile released by the Deep Impact spacecraft. A sequence of images is available online at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/17/ and http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/17/image/a. Time-lapse video images are available at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/17/video/.

The visible-light images show the comet before and after the impact. They were taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys' High Resolution Camera. The first of the three still images at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/17/ shows the comet about one minute before the impact. The encounter occurred at 1:52 AM EDT.

In the second image, captured 15 minutes after the collision, Tempel 1 appears four times brighter than in the pre-impact photo. Astronomers noticed that the inner cloud of dust and gas surrounding the comet's nucleus increased by about 120 miles (200 kilometers) in size. The impact caused a brilliant flash of light and a constant increase in the brightness of the inner cloud of dust and gas.

The Hubble telescope continued to monitor the comet, snapping the third image in the sequence 62 minutes after the encounter. In that photo, the gas and dust ejected during the impact are expanding outward in the shape of a fan. The fan-shaped debris is traveling at about 1,200 miles an hour (1,800 kilometers an hour), or twice as fast as the speed of a commercial jet. The debris extends about 1,200 miles (1,800 kilometers) from the nucleus.

The potato-shaped comet is 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) wide and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) long. Tempel 1's nucleus is too small even for the Hubble telescope to resolve. Photo credit: NASA, ESA, Paul Feldman (The Johns Hopkins University), and Hal Weaver (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory).

NASA's Deep Impact Tells a Tale of the CometNASA/JPL release 2005-113, 8 July 2005 Data from Deep Impact's instruments indicate an immense cloud of fine powdery material was released when the probe slammed into the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 at about 10 kilometers per second (6.3 miles per second or 23,000 miles per hour). The cloud indicated the comet is covered in the powdery stuff. The Deep Impact science team continues to wade through gigabytes of data collected during the July 4 encounter with the comet measuring 5-kilometers-wide by 11-kilometers-long (about 3-miles-wide by 7-miles-long). "The major surprise was the opacity of the plume the impactor created and the light it gave off," said Deep Impact Principal Investigator Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, College Park. "That suggests the dust excavated from the comet's surface was extremely fine, more like talcum powder than beach sand. And the surface is definitely not what most people think of when they think of comets—an ice cube." How can a comet hurtling through our solar system be made of a substance with less strength than snow or even talcum powder? "You have to think of it in the context of its environment," said Dr. Pete Schultz, Deep Impact scientist from Brown University, Providence, RI. "This city-sized object is floating around in a vacuum. The only time it gets

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bothered is when the Sun cooks it a little or someone slams an 820-pound wakeup call at it at 23,000 miles per hour." The data review process is not overlooking a single frame of approximately 4,500 images from the spacecraft's three imaging cameras taken during the encounter.

This false-color image shows comet Tempel 1 about 50 minutes after Deep Impact's probe smashed into its surface. The impact site is located on the far side of the comet in this view. The image was taken by the mission's flyby spacecraft as it turned back to face the comet for one last photo opportunity. The colors represent brightness, with white indicating the brightest materials and black showing the faintest materials. This brightness is a measure of reflected sunlight. The Sun is located to the right, out of the picture. Because the sunlit portion of the comet is brighter, it appears white. The comet's nucleus is silhouetted against the light reflected from surrounding dust. The large plume of dust that was kicked up upon impact can be seen as the colorful, drop-shaped object. This plume was very bright, indicating that the comet's surface material must be very fine, like talcum powder. The blue speck in the upper left corner is a star. This picture was taken by Deep Impact's high-resolution camera. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD.

"We are looking at everything from the last moments of the impactor to the final look-back images taken hours later, and everything in between," added A'Hearn. "Watching the last moments of the impactor's life is remarkable. We can pick up such fine surface detail that objects that are only four meters in diameter can be made out. That is nearly a factor of 10 better than any previous comet mission." The final moments of the impactor's life were important, because they set the stage for all subsequent scientific findings. Knowing the location and angle the impactor slammed into the comet's surface is the best place to start. Engineers have established the impactor took two not unexpected coma particle hits prior to impact. The impacts slewed the spacecraft's camera for a few moments before the attitude control system could get it back on track. The penetrator hit at an approximately 25 degree oblique angle relative to the comet's surface. That's when the fireworks began. The fireball of vaporized impactor and comet material shot skyward. It expanded rapidly above the impact site at approximately 5 kilometers per second (3.1 miles per second). The crater was just beginning to form. Scientists are still analyzing the data to determine the exact size of the crater. Scientists say the crater was at the large end of original expectations, which was from 50 to 250 meters (165 to 820 feet) wide.

Expectations for Deep Impact's flyby spacecraft were exceeded during its close brush with the comet. The craft is more than 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Tempel 1 and opening the distance at approximately 37,000 kilometers per hour (23,000 miles per hour). The flyby spacecraft is undergoing a thorough checkout, and all systems appear to be in excellent operating condition.

The Deep Impact mission was implemented to provide a glimpse beneath the surface of a comet, where material from the solar system's formation remains relatively unchanged. Mission scientists hoped the project would answer basic questions about how the solar system formed, by providing an in-depth picture of the nature and composition of the frozen celestial travelers known as comets. The University of Maryland is responsible for overall Deep Impact mission science, and project management is handled by JPL. The spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation, Boulder, CO.

Information and images from cameras aboard Deep Impact's impactor and flyby spacecraft can be watched in near-real time at www.nasa.gov/deepimpact. For additional information about Deep Impact on the Internet, visit http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov.

Contacts:D. C. Agle Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CAPhone: 818-393-9011 Dolores Beasley NASA Headquarters, Washington, DCPhone: 202-358-1753 Lee Tune University of Maryland, College Park, MDPhone: 301-405-4679

Lisa DeNikeJohns Hopkins UniversityPhone: 443-287-9960 E-mail: Lde@jhu.edu

Cheryl Gundy SpaceTelescope Science InstitutePhone: 410-338-4707E-mail: gundy@stsci.edu

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1628.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1629.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1630.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1631.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1632.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1633.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1634.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1638.htmlhttp://www.newscientistspace.com/channel/solar-system/dn7622http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/050630_deep_impact_CDs.htmlhttp://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050704_deepimpact_update.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05e.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05f.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05h.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05i.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05j.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05k.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05l.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05m.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/comet-05zg.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/deepimpact/050703deploy.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/deepimpact/050703sep.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/deepimpact/050704postimpact.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/deepimpact/050704crater.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/deepimpact/050704hubblepix.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/deepimpact/050708powder.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/deep_impact_smash.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/hubble_deep_impact.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/deep_impact_flash.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/swift_take_deep_impact.html

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http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/deep_impact_gemini.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/deep_impact_in_xrays.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/deep_impact_tells_story.html

FLASHLINE MARS "CREW GREENLEAF" PREPARES TO REACH DEVON ISLANDMars Society release8 July 2005

The first elements of the 2005 crew of the Mars Society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) have reached Resolute Bay. By tomorrow, all crew members will reach Resolute Bay, with crew put in on Devon Island expected to follow within a day.

Located 900 miles from the North Pole, the FMARS is situated in a polar desert whose geology mimics that which is expected to be found on Mars. The crew of the FMARS will attempt to conduct a sustained campaign of field exploration in this environment while operating under many of the same constraints that an actual astronaut crew would face on the Red Planet. By so doing, alternative strategies and technologies for exploration can be tested, with the goal of learning how to explore on Mars.

The FMARS was built by the Mars Society with privately raised funds in 2000. Six short duration crews first tested the station during the summer of 2001, and three longer duration crews operated the station during the summers of 2002, 2003, and 2004. This year's crew, which will operate on Devon for roughly four weeks, is thus the 10th FMARS Crew. It has been dubbed "Crew Greenleaf" in honor of the Greenleaf Corporation, a manufacturer of fine machine tools located in Saegertown, PA, whose sponsorship made this year's expedition possible.

Crew Greenleaf

Judd Reed: Commander. Engineer, U.S. (California). Judd was the commander of Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) Crew 10 in January 2003 and a FMARS Crew 9 engineer in July of 2004.

Tiffany Vora: Executive officer and Crew biologist. Microbiologist, U.S. (New Jersey). Tiffany was the crew biologist on MDRS Crew 3 in February 2002 and MDRS Crew 11 in January 2003.

Stacy Sklar: Geologist, U.S. (Arizona). Stacy was a crew geologist on MDRS Crew 3 in February 2002 and MDRS Crew 36 in March 2005.

Andy Wegner: Chemist, U.S. (Wisconsin). Andy was crew chemist and Executive Officer on MDRS Crew 32 in January 2005

Tiziana Trabucchi: Geologist, Italy. Tiziana was crew geologist on MDRS Crew 40, the "Mona Lisa Crew" in May 2005.

Anthony Kendall: Geologist, U.S. (Michigan). This is Anthony's first time as a Mars station crew member.

Crew activity reports and photos, covering operations, science, engineering, and other issues will be posted daily throughout the field season. A complete report on the activity of this year's expedition on Devon Island will be presented at the 8th International Mars Society convention, University of Colorado, Boulder, August 11- 14, 2005. Registration is now open at www.marssociety.org

MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS UPDATENASA/JPL release5 July 2005

Spirit has had an extremely successful week. On June 24, 2005 (sol 524), the rover drove 26 meters (85 feet). The following two sols, Spirit performed remote sensing. On June 27 (sol 527), Spirit completed another tricky drive and progressed 22.5 meters (74 feet). At this new site, scientists found an intriguing rock target they informally named "Independence Rock." Spirit will observe this layered rock with instruments on the robotic arm over the long Fourth of July weekend. The rover team commanded a small move positioning Spirit in front of this target, and the rover has begun the science observations. The first attempt to brush Independence Rock with the rock abrasion tool was unsuccessful because contact switches didn't connect. However, the rover team picked a new target in the same general area for Spirit to brush with the rock abrasion tool and analyze with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and Mössbauer spectrometer over the weekend.

Opportunity made its way back toward "Purgatory Dune" for a chance to explore its own tracks. During the drive the rover stopped along the way to study the soil at "North Dune."

This movie clip frame shows several gusts and whirlwinds carrying dust as they move toward NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It consists of frames taken by the navigation camera on Spirit during the afternoon of the rover's 501st martian day, or sol (May 31, 2005). The camera was facing into the wind. Contrast has been enhanced for anything in the images that changes from frame to frame, that is, for the dust moved by wind. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M.

Current status reports are available at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status.html.

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050705_rovers_update.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzv.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzw.html

MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGESNASA/JPL/MSSS release30 June - 6 July 2005

The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available.

Dark Martian Dunes (Released 30 June 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/30

South Polar Knob (Released 01 July 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/01

Knobby Eastern Arabia (Released 02 July 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/02

Small Dusty Volcano (Released 03 July 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/03

South Polar Polygons (Released 04 July 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/04

Mars at Ls 249 Degrees (Released 05 July 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/05

Nili Patera Dunes (Released 06 July 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/06 All of the Mars Global Surveyor images are archived at http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/index.html.

Mars Global Surveyor was launched in November 1996 and has been in Mars orbit since September 1997. It began its primary mapping mission on March 8, 1999. Mars Global Surveyor is the first mission in a long-term program of Mars exploration known as the Mars Surveyor Program that is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) and the California Institute of Technology built the MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission. MSSS operates the camera from its facilities in San Diego, CA. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Surveyor Operations Project operates the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft with its industrial partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, from facilities in Pasadena, CA and Denver, CO.

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MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGESNASA/JPL/ASU release27 June - 8 July 2005

Arsia Mons Western Flows (Released 27 June 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050627a.html

Arsia Mons Lava Flows (Released 28 June 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050629a.html

Broad Western Flows from Arsia Mons (Released 29 June 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050629a.html

Windstreak on Lava Flow (Released 30 June 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050630a.html

Eroding Lava Flows (Released 1 July 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050701a.html

THEMIS Images As Art #51 (Released 4 July 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050704A.html

THEMIS Images As Art #52 (Released 5 July 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050705A.html

THEMIS Images as Art #53 (Released 6 July 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050706A.html

THEMIS Images as Art #54 (Released 7 July 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050707A.html

THEMIS Images as Art #55 (Released 8 July 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050708A.html

All of the THEMIS images are archived at http://themis.la.asu.edu/latest.html.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

End Marsbugs, Volume 12, Number 24.

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