Posts tagged Mars
CU’s Mars mission off the ground
Nov 19th
successfully launches from Florida
A $671 million NASA mission to Mars led by the University of Colorado Boulder thundered into the sky today from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 1:28 p.m. EST, the first step on its 10-month journey to Mars.
Known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, the MAVEN spacecraft was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket provided by United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colo. The mission will target the role the loss of atmospheric gases played in changing Mars from a warm, wet and possibly habitable planet for life to the cold dry and inhospitable planet it appears to be today.
“Our team is incredibly excited,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN’s principal investigator who is at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). “Everything went absolutely perfectly, exactly as we had planned when we accepted the challenge to develop this mission five years ago. Now it’s on to Mars.”
The spacecraft is carrying three instrument suites. LASP’s Remote Sensing Package will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, while the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will measure the composition of neutral gases and ions.
The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California, Berkeley, with some instrument elements from LASP and NASA Goddard, contains six instruments to characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of Mars.
NASA selected the MAVEN mission for flight in 2008. Scientists think Mars was much more Earth-like roughly four billion years ago, and want to know how the climate changed, where the water went and what happened to the atmosphere, said Jakosky, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department.
CU-Boulder also is providing science operations and directing education and public outreach efforts. NASA Goddard provided two of the science instruments and manages the project. In addition to building the spacecraft, Lockheed Martin will perform mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is providing program management via the Mars Program Office, as well as navigation support, the Deep Space Network and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
MAVEN is slated to begin orbiting Mars in September 2014. For more information about MAVEN visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/ and http://www.nasa.gov/maven.
-CU-
CU joins Sloan Digital Sky Survey to map stars, galaxies and quasars in 3D
Jun 26th
The survey, known as SDSS-IV, is the fourth stage of an effort that began with SDSS-I in 2000 to create the largest digital color image of the northern sky, said CU-Boulder Professor Michael Shull of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department, lead scientist in the effort by CU-Boulder to join the survey. Since 2000, astronomers have mapped about one-half of the visible northern sky in three dimensions as part of the three prior Sloan sky surveys, discovering nearly half a billion astronomical objects ranging from asteroids and stars to galaxies and distant quasars in the process.
“We got into this because we think it is going to be a great recruitment tool for new students, and we have one of the best undergraduate majors in the country,” Shull said. “We also want to recruit high-caliber graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.”
The SDSS 2.5-meter telescope is located at the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, N.M., and is owned by the Astrophysical Research Consortium, or ARC, an organization of eight research institutions including CU-Boulder. The Sloan telescope sky-mapping project is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the participating institutions, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Apache Point also hosts several other telescopes, including a 3.5-meter optical telescope owned and operated by ARC and routinely used by CU-Boulder.
ARC was formed in 1984 to create a national observatory that could provide telescope time to each member university based on its investment. Current ARC members in addition to CU-Boulder are the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the University of Washington, the University of Virginia and New Mexico State University. CU-Boulder owns a one-eighth share of each of the two telescopes.
The costs to build new instruments, make observations and analyze data from the SDSS-IV from 2014 to 2020 is estimated to be between $50 million and $60 million, said Shull. The Sloan Foundation is contributing roughly $10 million, while additional funds are coming from more than 10 full institutional members, including CU, and from scientists with individual and small group memberships from various institutions.
Full institutional partners like CU-Boulder are paying roughly $1 million to join part four of the Sloan sky survey effort. CU-Boulder’s member fee was supported by university grants, awards, donations, general funds and indirect cost recovery savings. As an early institutional partner joining the Sloan IV survey before the end of the current fiscal year, CU received a $350,000 discount from ARC, said Shull.
Light from the Sloan telescope is directed to two powerful new instruments — a dual-channel visible light, or optical spectrograph, and a near-infrared spectrograph. Astronomical spectrographs break light into telltale colors much like a prism, revealing information about the size, temperature, composition and motion of celestial objects, said Shull.
The Sloan spectrographs will carry out a massive survey of galaxies and quasars in the distant universe, as well as stars in the Milky Way and thousands of nearby galaxies, said Shull, who also is a member of CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.
The new optical spectrograph on the Sloan telescope can take data from up to 1,000 galaxies or quasars simultaneously, he said. The instrument includes a circular aluminum plate roughly the size of a large pizza pan with 1,000 small perforations precisely drilled to match up with known astronomical objects in the sky. Each hole is plugged with an optical fiber attached to the spectrograph.
“I think this is going to be a perfect way for undergraduates to get their hands dirty working with ‘big data,’ said Shull. “A lot of undergraduates are better at computers than we are, so hiring a freshman or a sophomore who really wants to get into computing and big data sets in the field of astronomy is one of our goals.”
One of the biggest discoveries by SDSS-III astronomers came in 2012 when they detected the predicted signature of the first sound waves from matter and radiation in the early universe, said Shull. Sloan researchers used a multi-fiber spectrograph as part of the Baryon Oscillation Sky Survey, or BOSS, to detect the large-scale structures of ancient galaxies — similar in some ways to ripples on a pond — that were preserved after the Big Bang.
Shull, who plans to use the multi-fiber spectrograph to hunt for distant quasars in the early universe going back 13 million years, said the BOSS effort also is expected to reveal new information about so-called “dark energy.” A hypothetical form of energy that makes up the majority of the universe and produces a force that opposes gravity, dark energy is thought to be the cause of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Another SDSS-IV effort will be a sky survey in the infrared to probe the distribution, dynamics and chemistry of stars and to explore the formation of our Milky Way Galaxy and its two companion galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, said Shull. Since the two Magellanic Clouds are best viewed from the southern hemisphere, SDSS scientists plan to collaborate with astronomers who are using the 2.5 meter du Pont Telescope at Las Campanas, Chile, on the effort.
SDSS-IV astronomers also will be using the BOSS instrument to study the internal structure of 10,000 nearby galaxies. The data will include precise velocities of stellar motions and chemical abundances for a large range of galaxy masses, types and environments. The data will complement observations of two newly completed American telescopes: the ALMA millimeter and submillimeter array radio telescope in Chile and the Expanded-Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico.
SDSS-IV also has had a significant citizen science component since 2007, when a data set of a million galaxies was released to the public, who were asked to classify them in three categories: Elliptical galaxies, merging galaxies and spiral galaxies, including the direction of the spiral arms. An astounding 70,000 classifications were received by SDSS scientists from the public within an hour of the data release, and during the first year more than 150,000 people made more than 50 million galaxy classifications.
CU has a legacy in space dating back nearly 70 years, said CU-Boulder Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. It is the top funded public university by NASA, has a $70 million instrument now flying on the Hubble Space Telescope, is leading a $485 million mission to Mars and controls four NASA satellites from campus.
A video news story on the project is available at http://youtu.be/1Rke59L5cAo.
-CU-
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CU study hints conditions on Mars may support energy for life forms
May 30th
The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, also hint at the possibility that hydrogen-dependent life could have existed where iron-rich igneous rocks on Mars were once in contact with water.
Scientists have thoroughly investigated how rock-water reactions can produce hydrogen in places where the temperatures are far too hot for living things to survive, such as in the rocks that underlie hydrothermal vent systems on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The hydrogen gases produced in those rocks do eventually feed microbial life, but the communities are located only in small, cooler oases where the vent fluids mix with seawater.
The new study, led by CU-Boulder Research Associate Lisa Mayhew, set out to investigate whether hydrogen-producing reactions also could take place in the much more abundant rocks that are infiltrated with water at temperatures cool enough for life to survive.
“Water-rock reactions that produce hydrogen gas are thought to have been one of the earliest sources of energy for life on Earth,” said Mayhew, who worked on the study as a doctoral student in CU-Boulder Associate Professor Alexis Templeton’s lab in the Department of Geological Sciences.
“However, we know very little about the possibility that hydrogen will be produced from these reactions when the temperatures are low enough that life can survive. If these reactions could make enough hydrogen at these low temperatures, then microorganisms might be able to live in the rocks where this reaction occurs, which could potentially be a huge subsurface microbial habitat for hydrogen-utilizing life.”
When igneous rocks, which form when magma slowly cools deep within the Earth, are infiltrated by ocean water, some of the minerals release unstable atoms of iron into the water. At high temperatures — warmer than 392 degrees Fahrenheit — scientists know that the unstable atoms, known as reduced iron, can rapidly split water molecules and produce hydrogen gas, as well as new minerals containing iron in the more stable, oxidized form.
Mayhew and her co-authors, including Templeton, submerged rocks in water in the absence of oxygen to determine if a similar reaction would take place at much lower temperatures, between 122 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers found that the rocks did create hydrogen — potentially enough hydrogen to support life.
To understand in more detail the chemical reactions that produced the hydrogen in the lab experiments, the researchers used “synchrotron radiation” — which is created by electrons orbiting in a manmade storage ring — to determine the type and location of iron in the rocks on a microscale.
The researchers expected to find that the reduced iron in minerals like olivine had converted to the more stable oxidized state, just as occurs at higher temperatures. But when they conducted their analyses at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at Stanford University, they were surprised to find newly formed oxidized iron on “spinel” minerals found in the rocks. Spinels are minerals with a cubic structure that are highly conductive.
Finding oxidized iron on the spinels led the team to hypothesize that, at low temperatures, the conductive spinels were helping facilitate the exchange of electrons between reduced iron and water, a process that is necessary for the iron to split the water molecules and create the hydrogen gas.
“After observing the formation of oxidized iron on spinels, we realized there was a strong correlation between the amount of hydrogen produced and the volume percent of spinel phases in the reaction materials,” Mayhew said. “Generally, the more spinels, the more hydrogen.”
Not only is there a potentially large volume of rock on Earth that may undergo these low temperature reactions, but the same types of rocks also are prevalent on Mars, Mayhew said. Minerals that form as a result of the water-rock reactions on Earth have been detected on Mars as well, which means that the process described in the new study may have implications for potential Martian microbial habitats.
Mayhew and Templeton are already building on this study with their co-authors, including Thomas McCollom at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, to see if the hydrogen-producing reactions can actually sustain microbes in the lab.
This study was funded by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and with a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career grant to Templeton.
-CU-
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