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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter
Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
Editor/Publisher: David J. Thomas, Ph.D., Science Division, LyonCollege, Batesville, Arkansas72503-2317, USA.
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 LyonCollege. 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 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.
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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
Articles and News
Page 2READY FOR DINNER ON MARS?
ESA release
Page 3BOEING AND LOCKHEED MARTIN PUSH SEPARATE DESIGNS FOR POSSIBLE MOON MISSIONS
By Brian Berger
Page 3ASTRONOMERS DISCOVER MOST EARTH-LIKE EXTRASOLAR PLANET YET
By Robert Sanders
Page 4FACE ON MARS: WHY PEOPLE SEE WHAT'S NOT THERE
By Michael Scherber
Page 4DETAILING THE SCIENCE OF MAN ON MARS
From SpaceDaily
Page 4SMA CONFIRMS PROTO-PLANETARY SYSTEMS ARE COMMON IN THE GALAXY
Harvard-SmithsonianCenter for Astrophysics release 05-17
Page 6OUTER PLANET-PALOOZA! EUROPA, TITAN MISSIONS GET SUPPORT
By Leonard David
Page 6JUST HOW "EARTH-LIKE" IS THE NEWEST PLANET?
By Leslie Mullen
Page 7SETTING SETI'S SIGHTS: LATEST PLANET DISCOVERY SUGGESTS NEW TARGETS
By Douglas Vakoch
Page 7WOMEN, SPACE TRAVEL AND INFECTION: INTERNATIONAL BED-REST STUDY INVESTIGATES FEMALE IMMUNE RESPONSE ON EXTENDED MISSIONS
National Space Biomedical Research Institute release
Page 8ARIZONA REGENTS APPROVE UA ASTROBIOLOGYCENTER
By Lori Stiles
Page 9MOON, MARS MISSIONS NOT A PRIORITY FOR TAXPAYERS
Citizens Against Government Waste release
Page 10THE MARTIAN HOT SPOTS
By Joy Crisp
Page 11TERRAFORMING: HUMAN DESTINY OR HUBRIS?
By Dave Brody
Page 11IN SEARCH OF DIVERSITY
By Mitch Sogin
Page 13DOES LIFE EXIST ON OTHER PLANETS?
University of Bristol release
Page 13COMING CLUES TO THE ORIGIN OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM (BUT PROBABLY NOT THE EXPECTED ONES)
By Tom Van Flandern
Announcements
Page 13INTERESTED IN AN EXTREME ENVIRONMENT FACILITY?
From the NAI Newsletter
Page 14NATIONAL WORKSHOP ON ASTROBIOLOGY—26 OCTOBER 2005
From the NAI Newsletter
Page 14NASA INVESTIGATES REVOLUTIONARY SPACE EXPLORATION CONCEPTS
NASA release 05-151
Page 14NATIONAL ACADEMIES UNVEIL EVOLUTION WEB PAGE
National Academies release
Page 14RESULTS OF LIFE SCIENCES RESEARCH IN SPACE TO BE PRESENTED IN COLOGNE
ESA release 32-2005
Mission Reports
Page 16CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS FOR 9-15 JUNE 2005
NASA/JPL release
Page 18DEEP IMPACT UPDATES
Multiple agencies' releases
Page 19MER UPDATES
NASA/JPL releases
Page 19MARS EXPRESS: SMOOTH DEPLOYMENT FOR SECOND MARSIS ANTENNA BOOM
ESA release
Page 20MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES
NASA/JPL/MSSS release
Page 21MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES
NASA/JPL/ASU release
Page 21ROSETTA MONITORS DEEP IMPACT
ESA release
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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
READY FOR DINNER ON MARS?
ESA release
13 June 2005
"Martian bread and green tomato jam,""Spirulina gnocchis" and "Potato and tomato mille-feuilles" are three delicious recipes that two French companies have created for ESA and future space explorers to Mars and other planets. The challenge for the chefs was to offer astronauts well-flavored food, made with only a few ingredients that could be grown on Mars. The result was 11 tasty recipes that could be used on future ESA long-duration space missions. ADF (Alain Ducasse Formation) and GEM are the two French companies that produced the recipes, and their mutual experience in creating new products and "haute cuisine" have led to excellent results.
Space recipe "Spirulina Gnocchis":this dish has been created in the traditional way of making gnocchi. Beyond the nutritional aspect provided by the Spirulina, its original green color marries perfectly with the tomato sauce. The basic ingredients are potatoes, Spirulina and tomatoes, all envisioned to be grown in space, on Mars or other planets. The recipe was developed for ESA, in a research project defining nutrition for astronauts on future long-duration space missions. Image credit: ADF.
The French gourmet company ADF—Alain Ducasse Formation developed, with the French company GEM, 11 recipes for ESA in a research project defining nutrition for astronauts on future long-duration space missions. At least 40% of the diet should consist of nine basic ingredients that ESA envisions to grow in greenhouses on other planets. They are: rice, onions, tomatoes, soya, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, wheat and Spirulina. Image credit: ADF.
The menus were all based on nine main ingredients that ESA envisions could be grown in greenhouses of future colonies on Mars or other planets. The nine must comprise at least 40% of the final diet, while the remaining (up to) 60% could be additional vegetables, herbs, oil, butter, salt, pepper, sugar and other seasoning brought from Earth.
"We are aiming initially at producing 40% locally for astronauts' food on future long-duration space missions, for example to Mars," says Christophe Lasseur, ESA's biological life-support coordinator responsible for recycling and production of air, water and food for long-term space missions.
Space recipe "Potato and tomato mille-feuilles": the thin slices of potato, tomatoes and onion are cooked one by one, for a homogeneous color and a melting and crispy sensation in the mouth. The basic ingredients are potatoes and tomatoes, both thought to be easy to grow in space, on Mars or other planets. Image credit: ADF.
Space recipe "Martian bread and green tomato jam": this bread is a perfect combination of the genuine flavor of wheat and the sweet acidity of the tomato. A green tomato jam is presented as a side dish complementing the flavors of the main course. The basic ingredients are wheat and tomatoes, both envisioned to be grown in space, on Mars or other planets. Image credit: ADF.
"Why 40%? By growing enough plants to cover around 40% of what we eat, we also get 'for free' the oxygen and water needed to live", explains Lasseur.
The nine basic ingredients that Lasseur plans to grow on other planets are: rice, onions, tomatoes, soya, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, wheat and Spirulina—all common ingredients except the last. Spirulina is a blue-green alga [cyanobacterium], a very rich source of nutrition with lots of protein (65% by weight), calcium, carbohydrates, lipids and various vitamins that cover essential nutritional needs for energy in extreme environments.
Astronauts and cosmonauts from three different crews about to share a meal in the Zvezda Service Module on the International Space Station (ISS), 15 August 2001. Scott J. Horowitz opens a can of food as he floats near the ceiling. Others from the left are Susan J. Helms, Frank L. Culbertson, Jr., Yury V. Usachev, James S. Voss, and Vladimir N. Dezhurov. Image credit: NASA.
Today all the food for astronauts in space is brought from Earth, but this will not be possible for longer missions. Although still on the drawing board, ESA has already started research to see what could be grown on other planets—and what a self-supporting eco-system might look like on Mars.
"In addition to being healthy and sufficiently nutritious for survival, good food could potentially provide psychological support for the crew, away from Earth for years," emphasizes Lasseur.
ADF chef Armand Arnal, adds: "The main challenge was to create a wide panel of recipes, distinct and full-flavored, with only nine basic products."
"Moreover, we had absolute restrictions on using salt, but were allowed to add a bit of sugar and fat, ingredients normally essential to the elaboration of a dish and to highlight its flavors."
Read the original news release at
Additional articles on this subject are available at:
BOEING AND LOCKHEED MARTIN PUSH SEPARATE DESIGNS FOR POSSIBLE MOON MISSIONS
By Brian Berger
From Space News
13 June 2005
Although Boeing and Lockheed Martin plan to combine production of their respective Delta 4 and Atlas 5 rockets in the near future, for now the companies are pushing separate solutions based on those vehicles to help NASA achieve its goal of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. The U.S. Air Force spent a decade and well over $1 billion developing the Delta 4 and Atlas 5 under its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program, and the White House and Department of Defense want NASA to leverage that investment in carrying out U.S. President George W. Bush's vision for space exploration. The alternative is a vehicle that uses the propulsion elements of NASA's space shuttle orbiter—its main engines, solid-rocket boosters and giant external tank.
Read the full article at
ASTRONOMERS DISCOVER MOST EARTH-LIKE EXTRASOLAR PLANET YET
By Robert Sanders
University of California, Berkeley release
13 June 2005
The world's preeminent planet hunters have discovered the most Earth-like extrasolar planet yet: a possibly rocky world about 7.5 times as massive as the Earth. This hot "super-Earth," just 15 light years away, travels in a nearly circular orbit only 2 million miles from its parent star, Gliese 876, and has a radius about twice that of Earth. All the nearly 150 extrasolar planets discovered to date that are orbiting normal stars have been larger than Uranus, an ice giant about 15 times the mass of Earth.
"This is the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected and the first of a new class of rocky terrestrial planets," said team member Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution in Washington. "It's like Earth's bigger cousin."
"This planet answers an ancient question," said team leader Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus argued about whether there were other Earth-like planets. Now, for the first time, we have evidence for a rocky planet around a normal star."
Marcy, Butler, theoretical astronomer Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center, and post-doctoral researcher Eugenio J. Rivera of the University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz presented their findings today (Monday, June 13) during a press conference at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, VA.
Artist illustration of the rocky planet around the M dwarf Gliese 876. Image credit: NSF.
Part of a system that includes two other Jupiter-size planets, the new rocky planet whips around its star in a mere two days, and is so close to the star's surface that the astronomers say its temperature probably tops 200 to 400 degrees Celsius (400 to 750 degrees Fahrenheit)—oven temperatures far too hot for life as we know it. Nevertheless, the ability to detect the tiny wobble that the planet induces in the star gives them confidence that they will be able to discover even smaller rocky planets in orbits more hospitable to life. The team measures a minimum mass of 5.9 Earth masses for the new planet, which is orbiting Gliese 876 with a period of 1.94 days at a distance of 0.021 astronomical units (AU), or 2 million miles. Though the team has no proof that the planet is rocky, its low mass precludes it from retaining gas like Jupiter. Three other purportedly rocky extrasolar planets have been reported, but they orbit a pulsar, the flashing corpse of an exploded star.
Gliese 876 (or GJ 876) is a small, red star known as an M dwarf—the most common type of star in the galaxy. It is located in the constellation Aquarius, and, at about one-third the mass of the sun, is the smallest star around which planets have been discovered. Butler and Marcy detected the first planet in 1998, and it proved to be a gas giant about twice the mass of Jupiter. Then, in 2001, they reported a second planet, another gas giant about half the mass of Jupiter. The two are in resonant orbits, the outer planet taking 60 days to orbit the star, twice the period of the inner giant planet. Data on the Gliese 876 system, gathered from research the astronomers conducted at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, were analyzed by Lissauer and Rivera in order to model the unusual motions of the two known planets. Three years ago, they got an inkling that there might be a smaller, third planet orbiting the star. In fact, if they hadn't taken account of the resonant interaction between the two known planets, they never would have seen the third.
"We had a model for the two planets interacting with one another, but when we looked at the difference between the two-planet model and the actual data, we found a signature that could be interpreted as a third planet," Lissauer said.
A three-planet model consistently gave a better fit to the data, added Rivera. "But because the signal from this third planet was not very strong, we were very cautious about announcing a new planet until we had more data," he said.
Recent improvements to the Keck Telescope's high-resolution spectrometer (HIRES) provided the crucial new data. Vogt, who designed and built HIRES, worked with the technical staff in the UC Observatories/Lick Observatory Laboratories at UC Santa Cruz to upgrade the spectrometer's CCD (charge coupled device) detectors last August.
"It is the higher precision data from the upgraded HIRES that gives us confidence in this result,"Butler said.
The team now has convincing data for the planet orbiting very close to the star, at a distance of about 10 stellar radii. That's less than one-tenth the size of Mercury's orbit in our solar system.
"In a two-day orbit, it's about 200 degrees Celsius too hot for liquid water,"Butler said. "That tends to lead us to the conclusion that the most probable composition of this thing is like the inner planets of this solar system—a nickel/iron rock, a rocky planet, a terrestrial planet."
"The planet's mass could easily hold onto an atmosphere," noted Laughlin, an assistant professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz. "It would still be considered a rocky planet, probably with an iron core and a silicon mantle. It could even have a dense steamy water layer. I think what we are seeing here is something that's intermediate between a true terrestrial planet like the Earth and a hot version of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune."
A paper detailing the team's results has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. Coauthors on the paper are Steven Vogt and Gregory Laughlin of the Lick Observatory at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Debra Fischer of San FranciscoStateUniversity; and Timothy M. Brown of NSF's NationalCenter for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO.
Combined with improved computer software, the new CCD detectors designed by this team for Keck's HIRES spectrometer can now measure the Doppler velocity of a star to within one meter per second—human walking speed—instead of the previous precision of 3 meters per second. This improved sensitivity will allow the planet-hunting team to detect the gravitational effect of an Earth-like planet within the habitable zone of M dwarf stars like Gliese 876.
"We are pushing a whole new regime at Keck to achieve one meter per second precision, triple our old precision, that should also allow us to see Earth-mass planets around sun-like stars within the next few years,"Butler said.
"Our UC Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory team has done an enormous amount of optical and technical and detector work to make the Keck telescope a rocky planet hunter, the best one in the world," Marcy added.
Lissauer also is excited by another feat reported in the paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. For the first time, he, Rivera and Laughlin have determined the line-of-sight inclination of the orbit of the stellar system solely from the observed Doppler wobble of the star. Using dynamical models of how the two Jupiter-size planets interact, they were able to calculate the masses of the two giant planets from the observed shapes and precession rates of their oval orbits. Precession is the slow turning of the long axis of a planet's elliptical orbit. They showed that the orbital plane is tilted 40 degrees to our line of sight. This allowed the team to estimate the most likely mass of the third planet as 7.5 Earth masses.