Posts tagged Mars
CU :$20 million instrument package set for integration on Mars spacecraft
Nov 19th
The remote sensing package designed and built by CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics consists of the Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph, or IUVS, as well as its electronic control box, the Remote Sensing Data Processing Unit, or RSDPU, both under contract to NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, the $670 million NASA mission set for launch in November 2013 is being led by CU-Boulder Professor Bruce Jakosky. The mission is designed to explore and understand how the loss of atmospheric gas has changed the climate of Mars over the eons, said Jakosky, also associate director of LASP.
“With the delivery of this package, we are shifting from assembling the basic spacecraft to focusing on getting the science instruments onto the spacecraft,” said Jakosky, also a professor in the geological sciences department. “This is a major step toward getting us to launch and then getting the science return from the mission.”
According to David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager from NASA Goddard, “The remote sensing package team built a system that meets all technical requirements and delivered it on schedule and on budget. I look forward to the instrument’s next level of integration onto the spacecraft and ultimately the science it will provide.”
The IUVS collects UV light and spreads it out on a spectra that is recorded using imaging detectors, said Mitchell. As the “brains” of the instrument package, RSDPU receives and executes commands telling the IUVS when and where to point.
“As the ‘eyes’ of the remote sensing package, the IUVS allows us to study Mars and its atmosphere at a distance by looking at the light it emits,” said Nick Schneider, a LASP research associate and lead IUVS scientist for MAVEN. “Ultraviolet light is especially diagnostic of the state of the atmosphere, so our instrument provides the global context of the whole atmosphere for the local measurements made by the rest of the payload,” said Schneider, also a faculty member in the APS department.
The CU-Boulder remote sensing package will be turned on for its initial checkout 21 days after launch, said NASA officials. Later, in the “cruise phase” of the mission from Earth to Mars, the package will be powered on twice more for “state-of-health checks” and in-flight calibration.
MAVEN will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian atmosphere, with a goal of determining the history of the loss of atmospheric gases to space through time, providing answers about Mars climate evolution. By measuring the current rate of gas escaping to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes, scientists should be able to infer how the planet’s atmosphere evolved over time.
The MAVEN spacecraft will carry two other instrument suites. The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California Berkeley Space Science Laboratory with support from LASP and NASA Goddard, contains six instruments that will characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by NASA Goddard, will measure the composition and isotopes of neutral ions.
“Three of the big milestones in an instrument builder’s life are the day you get selected to fly on a mission, the day you deliver the instrument to the spacecraft to get ready for launch, and the day that it gets where it’s going and data starts flowing back from space,” said Mark Lankton, the remote sensing package program manager at LASP. “The remote sensing team is really happy to have gotten to the second milestone, and we can hardly wait to reach the third.”
CU-Boulder also will provide science operations and lead the education and public outreach efforts. NASA Goddard manages the project and is building two of the science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin is building the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., provides navigation support, the Deep Space Network, the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
“Our CU-Boulder IUVS instrument will be the most capable ultraviolet spectrometer ever sent to another planet,” said LASP instrument scientist William McClintock. “Data from the IUVS will help planetary scientists rewrite the textbooks about the upper atmosphere of Mars, and we are fortunate to have a top-flight engineering team here at LASP that allowed us to design and develop such a sophisticated instrument.”
Clues on the Martian surface, including features resembling dry lakes and riverbeds as well as minerals that form only in the presence of water, suggest that Mars once had a denser atmosphere that supported liquid water on the surface, Jakosky said. CU-Boulder’s participation in Mars exploration missions goes back to 1969 when NASA’s Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 missions launched.
MAVEN is slated to slide into orbit around Mars in September 2014, and, after a one-month checkout period, will make measurements from orbit for one Earth year. The MAVEN science team includes three LASP scientists from CU-Boulder heading instrument teams — Schneider, Frank Eparvier and Robert Ergun — as well as a large supporting team of scientists, engineers and mission operations specialists.
MAVEN also will include participation by a number of CU-Boulder graduate and undergraduate students in the coming years. Currently there are more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students working on research projects at LASP, which provides hands-on training for future careers as engineers and scientists, said Jakosky.
CU led mission to study past climate on Mars enters final phase before slated 2013 launch
Sep 11th
The mission, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere And Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, passed the critical agency milestone known as Key Decision Point-D, or KDP-D on Monday, said NASA officials. The key decision meeting moving MAVEN forward was held at NASA Headquarters in Washington and was chaired by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“The spacecraft and instruments are all coming together at this point,” said CU-Boulder Professor Bruce Jakosky, the MAVEN principal investigator and associate director for science at the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP. “Although we’re focused on getting everything ready for launch right now, we aren’t losing sight of our ultimate objective — getting to Mars and making the science measurements.”
NASA’s $670 million MAVEN mission will be the first devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The goal of MAVEN is to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time. Clues on the Martian surface, including features resembling dry lakes and riverbeds as well as minerals that form only in the presence of water, suggest that Mars once had a denser atmosphere that supported liquid water on the surface, Jakosky said.
“I’m incredibly proud of how this team continues to meet every major milestone on schedule on its journey to Mars,” said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Being ready for the start of system level integration and test is critically important to ultimately being ready for launch on November 18, 2013.”
KDP-D occurs after the project has completed a series of independent reviews that cover not only technical health of the project but also programmatic health, including schedule and cost. KDP-D represents the official transition from the Phase C development stage to Phase D in the mission life cycle. During Phase D, the spacecraft bus is completed, the science instruments are integrated into the spacecraft, spacecraft testing occurs and the MAVEN mission launches late in 2013.
The huge amount of public interest in NASA’s Curiosity Rover, which landed on Mars Aug. 6 and is currently being driven remotely around the planet, is no surprise to Jakosky. “Mars has a lot of similarities to Earth,” he said. “It’s the closest planet, it has similar day lengths, and it has an atmosphere, weather and geologic processes similar to those on our own planet.
“But the real kicker is the potential for life,” said Jakosky, who also directs the Center for Astrobiology at the University of Colorado. “Because of that, I think Mars has always held a special place in the hearts and minds of the public.”
Jakosky, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department, cautioned that there is much more work to be done before launch. “This decision by NASA marks the start of integration of all of the instruments on the spacecraft. It’s cool to see the spacecraft coming together, but there is a lot of work still to go and a lot of challenges to solve between now and when the spacecraft is ready for launch.”
The next major review for the MAVEN team is the Mission Operations Review in November 2012. This review assesses the project’s operational readiness and its progress towards launch. The project will continue to work with partners to deliver all instruments in the next four months.
“CU-Boulder’s participation in Mars exploration missions goes back decades, beginning with NASA’s Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 missions launched in 1969,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “LASP is a proven training ground for students seeking hands-on experience in building, testing and flying space hardware and is the only institute in the world to have designed and built instruments that have been launched to every planet in the solar system.”
The MAVEN spacecraft will carry three instrument suites. The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California at Berkeley with some instrument elements from CU’s LASP and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., contains six instruments that will characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet.
The Remote Sensing Package built by LASP will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, while The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by NASA Goddard, will measure the composition and isotopes of neutrals and ions.
MAVEN will launch during a 20-day period in November-December 2013. It will go into orbit around Mars in September 2014, and, after a one-month checkout period, will make measurements from orbit for one Earth year.
In addition to leading the mission and providing instrumentation, CU-Boulder will provide science operations and direct education and public outreach efforts. NASA’s Goddard manages the project. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., is building the spacecraft and will perform mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena provides program management via the Mars Program Office, as well as navigation support, the Deep Space Network and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
The MAVEN science team includes three LASP scientists from CU-Boulder heading instrument teams — Nick Schneider, Frank Eparvier and Robert Ergun — as well as a large supporting team of scientists, engineers and mission operations specialists.
MAVEN will include participation by a number of CU-Boulder graduate and undergraduate students in the coming years. Currently there are more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students working on research projects at LASP, which provides hands-on training for future careers as engineers and scientists, said Jakosky.
For more information about MAVEN visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/ and www.nasa.gov/maven. For more information on LASP visithttp://lasp.colorado.edu/home/.
CU scientists find life forms in a lifeless land
Jun 14th
A new DNA analysis of rocky soils in the Martian-like landscape on some volcanoes in South America has revealed a handful of bacteria, fungi and other rudimentary organisms called archaea, which seem to have a different way of converting energy than their cousins elsewhere in the world.
“We haven’t formally identified or characterized the species,” said Ryan Lynch, a CU-Boulder doctoral student involved in the study. “But these are very different than anything else that has been cultured. Genetically, they’re at least 5 percent different than anything else in the DNA database of 2.5 million sequences.”
Life gets little encouragement on the incredibly dry slopes of the tallest volcanoes in the Atacama region, where CU-Boulder Professor Steve Schmidt and his team collected soil samples. Much of the sparse snow that falls on the terrain sublimates back to the atmosphere soon after it hits the ground, and the soil is so depleted of nutrients that nitrogen levels in the scientists’ samples were below detection limits.
One of the most hostile environments on the planet
Ultraviolet radiation in the high-altitude environment can be twice as intense as in a low-elevation desert, said Schmidt of CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. While the researchers were on site, temperatures dropped to 14 degrees Fahrenheit one night and spiked to 133 F the next day.
How the newfound organisms survive under such circumstances remains a mystery. Although Ryan, Schmidt and their colleagues looked for genes known to be involved in photosynthesis and peered into the cells using fluorescent techniques to look for chlorophyll, they couldn’t find evidence that the microbes were photosynthetic.
Instead, they think the microbes might slowly generate energy by means of chemical reactions that extract energy and carbon from wisps of gases such as carbon monoxide and dimethylsulfide that blow into the desolate mountain area. The process wouldn’t give the bugs a high-energy yield, Lynch said, but it could be enough as it adds up over time. A paper on the findings has been accepted by the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, published by the American Geophysical Union.
While normal soil has thousands of microbial species in just a gram of soil, and garden soils even more, remarkably few species have made their home in the barren Atacama mountain soil, the new research suggests. “To find a community dominated by less than 20 species is pretty amazing for a soil microbiologist,” Schmidt said.
Nearly 20,000 feet in altitude, snowless for 48,000 years
He has studied sites in the Peruvian Andes where, four years after a glacier retreats, there are thriving, diverse microbe communities. But on these volcanoes on the Chile-Argentina border, which rise to altitudes of more than 19,685 feet and which have been ice-free for 48,000 years, the bacterial and fungal ecosystems have not undergone succession to more diverse communities. “It’s mostly due to the lack of water, we think,” he said. “Without water, you’re not going to develop a complex community.”
“Overall, there was a good bit lower diversity in the Atacama samples than you would find in most soils, including other mountainous mineral soils,” Lynch said. That makes the Atacama microbes very unusual, he added. They probably had to adapt to the extremely harsh environment, or may have evolved in different directions than similar organisms elsewhere due to long-term geographic isolation.
Growth on the mountain might be intermittent, Schmidt suggested, especially if soils only have water for a short time after snowfall. In those situations, there could be microbes that grow when it snows, then fall dormant, perhaps for years, before they grow again. High-elevation sites are great places to study simple microbial communities, ecosystems that haven’t evolved past the very basics of a few bacteria and fungi, Schmidt said.
“There are a lot of areas in the world that haven’t been studied from a microbial perspective, and this is one of the main ones,” he said. “We’re interested in discovering new forms of life, and describing what those organisms are doing, how they make a living.”
Schmidt’s lab, along with others, is studying how microorganisms travel from one site to another. One common method of microbe transport is through the air — they’re caught up in winds, sucked up into clouds, form rain droplets and then fall back to the ground somewhere else as precipitation.
But on mountains like Volcán Llullaillaco and Volcán Socompa, the high UV radiation and extreme temperatures make the landscape inhospitable to outside microbes. “This environment is so restrictive, most of those things that are raining down are killed immediately,” Schmidt said. “There’s a huge environmental filter here that’s keeping most of these things from growing.”
The next steps for the researchers are laboratory experiments using an incubator that can mimic the extreme temperature fluctuations to better understand how any organism can live in such an unfriendly environment. Studying the microbes and finding out how they can live at such an extreme can help set boundaries for life on Earth, Schmidt said, and tells scientists what life can stand. There’s a possibility that some of the extremophiles might utilize completely new forms of metabolism, converting energy in a novel way.
Schmidt also is working with astrobiologists to model what past conditions were like on Mars. With their rocky terrain, thin atmosphere and high radiation, the Atacama volcanoes are some of the most similar places on Earth to the Red Planet.
“If we know, on Earth, what the outer limits for life were, and they know what the paleoclimates on Mars were like, we may have a better idea of what could have lived there,” he said.
Other paper authors included Andrew King of Ecosystem Sciences, CSIRO Black Mountain in Acton, Australia; Mariá Farías of Laboratorio de Investigaciones Microbiologicas de Lagunas Andinas, Planto Piloto de Procesos Industriales Microbiologicas, CCT, CONICET in Tucuman, Argentina; Preston Sowell of Geomega, an environmental consulting firm in Boulder; and Christian Vitry of Museo de Arqueologia de Alta Montana in Salta, Argentina.