CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
CU-BOULDER SPACE SCIENTISTS READY FOR ORBITAL INSERTION OF MERCURY SPACECRAFT
Mar 15th
NASA’s MESSENGER mission, launched in 2004, is slated to slide into Mercury’s orbit March 17 after a harrowing 4.7 billion mile journey that involved 15 loops around the sun and will bring relief and renewed excitement to the University of Colorado Boulder team that designed and a built an $8.7 million instrument onboard.
“In 2004, this milestone seemed like it was a long, long way away,” said Senior Research Associate William McClintock, a mission co-investigator from CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “But here we are at last, poised to help solve some of the many tantalizing mysteries about Mercury.”
The smallest of the solar system’s four rocky planets, Mercury is about two-thirds of the way nearer to the sun than Earth and has been visited by only one other spacecraft, NASA’s Mariner 10, in 1974 and 1975. CU-Boulder scientists say learning what makes the hot, rocky planet tick will help them better understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems.
The refrigerator-sized spacecraft is carrying seven instruments — a camera, a magnetometer, an altimeter and four spectrometers. Designed and built by CU-Boulder’s LASP, the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, is a power-packed, 7-pound instrument that will make measurements of Mercury’s surface and its tenuous atmosphere, called the exosphere.
MASCS breaks up light like a prism, and since each element and compound has a unique spectral signature, scientists can determine the distribution and abundance of various minerals and gases on the planet’s surface and exosphere, said McClintock. “We now know Mercury’s exosphere is constantly changing,” he said.
During a 2009 MESSENGER flyby of Mercury, MASCS detected magnesium, an element created inside exploding stars, clumped in the exosphere. The team determined magnesium, sodium and potassium and several other kinds of atoms flying off Mercury’s surface were being accelerated by solar radiation pressure to form a gigantic tail of material flowing away from the sun, said McClintock.
“All of the instruments on MESSENGER had to be extremely light, which stretched our imaginations and creativity,” Lankton said. “We have learned a lot, and wound up getting a lot of bang for our buck.”
LASP Director Daniel Baker, also a co-investigator on the MESSENGER mission, is studying Mercury’s magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind, including violent “sub-storms” that occur in the planet’s vicinity. Since Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, MESSENGER is equipped with a large sunshade and heat-resistant ceramic fabric to protect it, said Baker.
“The three successful flybys of MESSENGER past Mercury have already rewritten the textbooks about the sun’s nearest neighbor,” Baker said. “We are pleased by all we have learned about the space environment of the planet. But we think there is so much more to learn — we’ve probably just scratched the surface, so to speak.”
Baker said the orbit insertion of Mercury will be celebrated by all of LASP, including a solar science team that saw its $28 million instrument crash into the sea March 4 due to problems with a NASA-contracted launch vehicle. “A very important aspect of LASP is that it is like a big family,” Baker said. “Everyone shares the joys of success and the sorrow of failure, which has been a blessedly rare occurrence in our history.”
“We have all of our appendages crossed for a successful orbit insertion,” said LASP’s Mark Lankton, program manager for MASCS. “MESSENGER is part of NASA’s Discovery Program, and I’d be surprised if we don’t continue to be surprised. Once we are in Mercury’s orbit we are going to be getting a bounty of new data every day.”
Dozens of undergraduates and graduate students will be involved in analyzing data as information and images begin pouring back to Earth from MESSENGER, dubbed “the little spacecraft that could” by LASP scientists. “This mission is going to be a field day for students, not only at CU-Boulder, but for students all over the world,” said Baker.
CU-Boulder’s LASP is the only space institute in the world to have designed and flown instruments that have visited or are en route to every planet in the solar system. LASP also has a student-built dust-counting instrument on NASA’s New Horizons Mission, launched in 2006 to Pluto and now approaching the orbit of Uranus.
“LASP has some of the best people in the world pursuing great science, great engineering, wonderful mission operations, and superb administrative and managerial achievement,” said Baker. “When such a team is given the facilities and resources to thrive, the sky is the limit. But it all starts with our people, including our students.”
The data will be sent via NASA’s Deep Space Network to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University — which is managing the mission for NASA — where mission scientists, including researchers and students at LASP’s Space Technology Building at the CU Research Park, will access it electronically, he said.
Sean Solomon from the Carnegie Institute of Washington in Washington, D.C., is the chief MESSENGER scientist. For more information on the MESSENGER mission, including images, photos, animation and videos, visit the website at http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/. For more information about LASP, visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/.
Located at 1234 Innovation Drive on CU-Boulder’s East Campus, LASP is hosting an open house March 17 to celebrate the MESSENGER spacecraft’s insertion into orbit around Mercury. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. Lankton will give a talk on the mission and Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder will give a talk on Mercury beginning at 6 p.m. NASA’s broadcast of the orbit insertion — a 15-minute maneuver — will take place beginning at 6:45 p.m.
CU-BOULDER TO HOST CAMPUS MASTER PLAN OPEN HOUSE ON MARCH 16
Mar 14th
The Campus Master Plan, a guiding document required by the Colorado Commission of Higher Education, outlines campus development over the next decade. The university began the planning process over a year ago with eight task force groups consisting of members from the campus and the community. Each task force provided input on larger focus areas and subjects. After receiving final reports from each task force, the university hired consultants for technical areas, compiled information, and wrote the draft plan.
“The Campus Master Plan represents a convergence of key communities on campus and within the city of Boulder,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “We are putting forth a bold vision — one that makes maximum use of our existing resources, promotes sustainability and innovation, and that will accommodate new generations of students. Together, moving the plan forward, we are laying the groundwork for a bold new century for CU-Boulder.”
Following the 30-day comment period, planners will finalize the document and submit it for approval to campus planning and design boards, the Board of Regents and ultimately the CCHE. The approved Campus Master Plan will guide CU-Boulder campus development until 2020.
The Center for Community is located on the CU-Boulder campus on Regent Drive, just east of Broadway, and the Flatirons Room is located on the third floor. Pay visitor parking is located just west of the building. After 5 p.m. the parking lot across the street is free.
A draft of the master plan will be available for download on March 16 at http://www.colorado.edu/masterplan.
NEANDERTHALS WERE NIFTY AT CONTROLLING FIRE, ACCORDING TO CU-BOULDER RESEARCHER
Mar 14th
The conclusion comes from the study of scores of ancient archaeological research sites in Europe that show convincing evidence of long-term fire control by Neanderthals, said Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. Villa co-authored a paper on the new study with Professor Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands.
“Until now, many scientists have thought Neanderthals had some fires but did not have continuous use of fire,” said Villa. “We were not expecting to find a record of so many Neanderthal sites exhibiting such good evidence of the sustained use of fire over time.”
A paper on the subject was published in the March 14 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Neanderthals are thought to have evolved in Europe roughly 400,000 to 500,000 years ago and went extinct about 30,000 years ago. Neanderthals ranged over much of Europe and stretched to Central Asia. Neanderthals were stockier than anatomically modern humans and even shared the same terrain for a time, and there is evidence that contemporary humans carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA. Modern humans began migrating out of Africa to Europe some 40,000 years ago.
Archaeologists consider the emergence of stone tool manufacturing and the control of fire as the two hallmark events in the technological evolution of early humans. While experts agree the origins of stone tools date back at least 2.5 million years in Africa, the origin of fire control has been a prolonged and heated debate.
Villa and Roebroeks, who together speak and read six languages, have visited or worked at dozens of the Neanderthal excavation sites in Europe. They also combed libraries throughout Europe and the United States for research papers on evidence for early fire use in Europe, contacting researchers involved in the excavations when possible for additional information and insight.
As part of the study they created a database of 141 potential fireplace sites in Europe dating from 1.2 million years ago to 35,000 years ago, assigning an index of confidence to each site. Evidence for the sustained use of fire includes the presence of charcoal, heated stone artifacts, burned bones, heated sediments, hearths and rough dates obtained from heated stone artifacts. Sites with two or more of the characteristics were interpreted as solid evidence for the control of fire by the inhabitants.
The second major finding in the PNAS study — perhaps even more surprising than the first — was that Neanderthal predecessors pushed into Europe’s colder northern latitudes more than 800,000 years ago without the habitual control of fire, said Roebroecks. Archaeologists have long believed the control of fire was necessary for migrating early humans as a way to reduce their energy loss during winters when temperatures plunged below freezing and resources became more scarce.
“This confirms a suspicion we had that went against the opinions of most scientists, who believed it was impossible for humans to penetrate into cold, temperate regions without fire,” Villa said.
Recent evidence from an 800,000-year-old site in England known as Happisburgh indicates hominids — likely Homo heidelbergenis, the forerunner of Neanderthals — adapted to chilly environments in the region without fire, Roebroeks said.
The simplest explanation is that there was no habitual use of fire by early humans prior to roughly 400,000 years ago, indicating that fire was not an essential component of the behavior of the first occupants of Europe’s northern latitudes, said Roebroeks. “It is difficult to imagine these people occupying very cold climates without fire, yet this seems to be the case.”
While the oldest traces of human presence in Europe date to more than 1 million years ago, the earliest evidence of habitual Neanderthal fire use comes from the Beeches Pit site in England dating to roughly 400,000 years ago, said Villa. The site contained scattered pieces of heated flint, evidence of burned bones at high temperatures, and individual pockets of previously heated sediments. Neanderthals, like other early humans, created and used a unique potpourri of stone tools, evidence that they were the ancient inhabitants of particular sites in Europe.
The sites catalogued by the team were dated by several methods, including electron spin resonance, paleomagnetism and thermoluminescence. Some research teams also have used microscopic studies of sediment at sites to confirm the presence of ashes. While some of the best evidence for controlled use of fire in Europe comes from caves, there are many open-air sites with solid evidence of controlled fire, they said.
According to Villa, one of the most spectacular uses of fire by Neanderthals was in the production of a sticky liquid called pitch from the bark of birch trees that was used by Neanderthals to haft, or fit wooden shafts on, stone tools. Since the only way to create pitch from the trees is to burn bark peels in the absence of air, archaeologists surmise Neanderthals dug holes in the ground, inserted birch bark peels, lit them and covered the hole tightly with stones to block incoming air.
“This means Neanderthals were not only able to use naturally occurring adhesive gums as part of their daily lives, they were actually able to manufacture their own,” Villa said. “For those who say Neanderthals did not have elevated mental capacities, I think this is good evidence to the contrary.”
Many archaeologists believe Neanderthals and other early hominids struck pieces of flint with chunks of iron pyrite to create the sparks that made fire and may well have conserved and transported fire from site to site.
Some anthropologists have proposed that Neanderthals became extinct because their cognitive abilities were inferior, including a lack of long-term planning, said Villa. But the archaeological record shows Neanderthals drove herds of big game animals into dead-end ravines and ambushed them, as evidenced by repeatedly used kill sites — a sign of long-term planning and coordination among hunters, she said.
Recent findings have even indicated Neanderthals were cooking, as evidenced by tiny bits of cooked plant material recovered from their teeth.
SOURCE: CU MEDIA RELEASE