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NEW MAP REVEALS HIDDEN FEATURES OF ICE-BURIED ANTARCTIC LAKE, MEASUREMENT SHOWS THAT TWO DISTINCT ECOSYSTEMS MAY EXIST
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- KEPLER PRIZE AWARD WINNER 2004 ANNOUNCED
- GET IN LINE TO FIND EXTRASOLAR PLANETS
- TERRAFORMING MARS, THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT ZUBRIN
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NEW MAP REVEALS HIDDEN FEATURES OF ICE-BURIED ANTARCTIC LAKE, MEASUREMENT SHOWS THAT TWO DISTINCT ECOSYSTEMS MAY EXIST National Science Foundation release 7 July 2004 Scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) at Columbia University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York State have developed the first-ever map of water depth in Lake Vostok, which lies between 3,700 and 4,300 meters (more than 2 miles) below the continental Antarctic ice sheet. The new comprehensive measurements of the lake—roughly the size of North America's Lake Ontario—indicate it is divided into two distinct basins that may have different water chemistry and other characteristics. The findings have important implications for the diversity of microbial life in Lake Vostok and provide a strategy for how scientists study the lake’s different ecosystems should international scientific consensus approve exploration of the pristine and ancient environment. Michael Studinger, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) at Columbia University, said that the existence of two distinct regions with the lake would have significant implications for what sorts of ecosystems scientists should expect to find in the lake and how they should go about exploring them. "The ridge between the two basins will limit water exchange between the two systems," he said. "Consequently, the chemical and biological composition of these two ecosystems is likely to be different." The National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, supported the work. NSF manages the U.S. Antarctic Program, which coordinates almost all U.S. science on the southernmost continent. The new measurements are significant because they provide a comprehensive picture of the entire lakebed and indicate that the bottom of the lake contains a previously unknown, northern sub-basin separated from the southern lakebed by a prominent ridge. Using laser altimeter, ice-penetrating radar and gravity measurements collected by aircraft, Studinger and Robin Bell, of LDEO, and Anahita Tikku, formerly of the University of Tokyo and now at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, estimate that Lake Vostok contains roughly 5400 cubic kilometers (1300 cubic miles) of water. Their measurements also indicate that the top of the ridge dividing the two basins is only 200 meters (650 feet) below the bottom of the ice sheet. Elsewhere, the water ranges from roughly 400 meters (1,300 feet) deep in the northern basin to 800 meters (2,600 feet) deep in its southern counterpart. Water that passes through the lake starts on one end as melted ice from the very bottom of the ice sheet, which refreezes at the other end. According to the new measurements, the base of the ice sheet melts predominantly over the smaller northern basin, while the water in the lake refreezes over the larger southern basin. The researchers assert that water takes between 55,000 and 110,000 years to cycle through the lake. 
An image of the contours of the bed of Lake Vostok from data obtained by gravity measurements. Image credit: Michael Studinger/National Science Foundation. The arrangement of the two basins, their separation and the characteristics of the meltwater may, the scientists conclude, all have implications for the circulation of water within the lake. It is possible, for example, that if the water in the lake were fresh, meltwater in the northern basin would sink to the bottom of that basin, limiting the exchange of waters between the two basins. The meltwater in the adjacent basin likely would be different. The two lake basins, they argue, could therefore have very different bottoms. The scientists also point out that the waters of the two basins may, as a result of the separation, have a very different chemical and even biological composition. Indeed, Lake Vostok, is also of interest to those who search for microbial life elsewhere in the solar system. The lake is thought to be a very good terrestrial analog of the conditions on Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter. If life can exist in Vostok, scientists have argued, then microbes also might thrive on Europa. The new measurements also indicate that different strategies may be needed to target sampling of specific types of lake sediments. Those released from the ice sheet represent the rocks over which the ice traveled, for example, and would be more prominent in the northern basin. Material in the southern basin would be more likely to represent the environmental conditions before the ice sheet sealed off the lake. Scientists deciding whether and how to proceed with an exploration of Lake Vostok say a great deal of technological development would likely be needed before a device could be deployed to conduct contamination-free sampling. Currently, no scientific sampling of the lake is being carried out. The ultimate goal of any sampling would be to obtain water and sediment samples from the lake bottom. The team published the new maps in the June 19 edition of Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. Read the original news release at http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/newsroom/pr.cfm?ni=10000000000113. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1075.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/antarctic-04g.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/two_ecosystems_vostok.html KEPLER PRIZE AWARD WINNER 2004 ANNOUNCED Mars Society release 9 July 2004 The Mars Society announces that the first overall winner of The Kepler Prize for Mars Mission Design is team Daedalus, lead by Kent Nebergall. The judging panel decided that team Daedalus provided the best balance of material in answer to the criteria set in the request for proposal document. The prize award includes certificates for team members, a trophy for the team leader, and the chance to present their design to the assembled Mars Society conference in Chicago, IL. The winner of the college division of the competition was The Personnel Earth Return Vehicle, a design submitted by an aerospace engineering design class at Penn State University. The team captain was Alicia Cole-Quigley. Team members will receive certificates, and the team leader will receive a trophy. The competition required teams to develop a design for an Earth Return Vehicle (ERV), a critical portion of the Mars Direct mission architecture. The ERV lands on Mars without a crew, autonomously filling its propellant tanks. The crew arrives later and uses the ERV to return to Earth. The complicated power, landing, and deployment stages for the vehicle provided plenty of challenge for design groups. A total of five teams submitted design documentation in time for judging: three independents (two from the U.S. and one from England) and two college teams. Teams were judged within their division first, followed by a second round of judging between the division winners for declaration of an overall winner. All teams have been invited to present their designs at 7th International Mars Society Convention this year as part of a half-hour session paper. The conference will take place at the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, August 19-22. Registration is now open at www.marssociety.org. Teams took radically different approaches to solve problems associated with the mission requirements. The difference in approaches made it difficult for judges to pick the winner that combined the best of new ideas and old technology to design a vehicle that would work while keeping development costs as low as possible. Judging criteria included Technical Merit (25 points), Publicity (20 points), Innovation (15 points), Simplicity (15 points), Completeness (10 points), Reliance on Current Technology (10 points), and Team Size (5 points). As a public outreach project, publicity carried a lot of weight in the judging. At times a team's publicity efforts tilted the scales in their favor. Currently, the release of reports is up to individual teams. If copies are desired, contact Tom Hill at the email address below, and he will connect interested parties with teams. Teams are encouraged to submit their reports to The Mars Society report archive, and inclusion in a future publication is possible, as Apogee Books will be publishing the convention proceedings in book form. The Kepler Prize competition started in 2003, with a kick-off presentation to the assembled Mars Society convention. The goal of the design contest was to get more people thinking about Mars mission design, while in the process producing a workable design for the Earth Return Vehicle. Teams were required to submit a mid-term report of 10 or less pages in December and then a final report of no more than 100 pages on the 1st of June. Judges for The Kepler Prize included Brian Enke, Dewey Anderson, and the project director, Tom Hill. Frank Shubert provided special support to the project. There is no Kepler Prize contest scheduled as yet for the 2004-05 year, although others may be held in the future. For more information or to express interest in competing in future contests, contact Tom Hill (hillkid@earthlink.net). GET IN LINE TO FIND EXTRASOLAR PLANETS Based on UTA report From Astrobiology Magazine 9 July 2004 More than 100 planetary systems have already been discovered around distant stars. McDonald Observatory astronomers Bill Cochran, Michael Endl, and Barbara McArthur have exploited the Hobby-Eberly Telescope's (HET's) capabilities to find and confirm, with great precision, the giant telescope's first planet outside our solar system. The event serves as proof-of-concept that HET, combined with its High Resolution Spectrograph instrument, is on track to become a major player in the hunt for other worlds. The research has been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters. With a mass 2.84 times that of Jupiter, the newly discovered planet orbits the star HD 37605 every 54.23 days. HD 37605 is a little smaller and little cooler than the Sun. The star, which is of a type called "K0" or "K-zero," is rich in heavy chemical elements compared to the Sun. Of the approximately 120 extrasolar planets found to date, this new planet has the third most eccentric orbit, bringing it in close in to its parent star like a "hot Jupiter," and swinging it back out. The planet's average distance from its star is 0.26 Astronomical Units (AU). One AU is the Earth-Sun distance. The team used the "radial velocity" technique, a common planet-search method, to find the planet. By measuring changes in the star's velocity toward and away from Earth—its wobble—they deduced that HD 37605 is orbiting the center of mass of a star-planet system. "In 100 days of observations—less than two full orbits—we were able to get a very good solution for this planet's orbit," Cochran said. The quick results were due to HET's "queue scheduling" system. Astronomers do not travel to the observatory to operate the telescope themselves. Rather, a telescope operator at McDonald Observatory has a list of all HET research projects and selects the ones best suited to any given night's weather conditions and Moon phase. This way, many targets for different research projects can be observed each night, and any particular target can be observed dozens of nights in a row. According to Cochran, "queue scheduling is the ideal way to do planet searching. If the HET had a normal scheduling system, it would have taken us a year or two to confirm this planet." Endl added that "with the queue scheduling mode, we can put every candidate star back into the queue at a high priority to secure follow-up telescope observations immediately." Cochran added that the high precision of the team's radial velocity measurements "proves that the HET and the High Resolution Spectrograph have met their design specs." He explained that the total error (called "root-mean-square deviation") in the team's velocity measurements was 3 meters per second—state of the art for planet searching. Many of the team's measurements had even lower errors. The HET contains the world's largest primary mirror, measuring 11 meters (433 inches) from edge to edge. Due to its innovative design, the HET was built and commissioned for $15 million, a fraction of the cost of other comparable telescopes. Because of the way the Hobby-Eberly Telescope is used, 9.2 meters (362 inches) of its surface are accessible at any given time. Thus, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope is effectively the third-largest telescope in the world, after the twin 10-meter (393-inch) Keck I and Keck II telescopes in Hawaii. The HET attained "first light" in December 1996 and "first spectrum" in September 1997. HET stands on Mount Fowlkes at McDonald Observatory in far West Texas, which has the darkest skies of any major observatory in the continental United States. The High Resolution Spectrograph that made this research possible was built by Phillip MacQueen, Robert Tull, and John Good of The University of Texas at Austin. The 9.2 meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope is a joint project of The University of Texas at Austin, The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), Stanford University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Muenchen, and Georg-August-Universitat Goettingen. This planet detection research is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1069.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0407/10planet/ http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/ observatory_finds_first_planet.html
From Astrobiology Magazine 12 July 2004 As a former Martin-Marietta aerospace engineer, prolific author and founder of the non-profit Mars Society (1998), Robert Zubrin is regarded as the driving force behind the proposed Mars Direct mission to reduce the cost and complexity of interplanetary travel. The flight plan calls for a return journey fueled by rocket propellant harvested in situ, from the martian atmosphere itself. 
Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society and author of Mars Direct. Image credit: Zubrin. As described in Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet, the Mars Direct concept eventually became a cornerstone of a frugal "living off the land" approach to travel in NASA's Design Reference Mission. The Design Reference Mission (DRM) covers Earth launch to Mars landing, Mars cruise to Mars launch, and Earth return. The mission entails sending cargo ahead, docking the crew at the space station, then meeting up with the stashed supplies once on Mars. "For our generation and many that will follow, Mars is the New World," writes Zubrin. The New York Times Book Review (Dennis Overbye) indicated how such an outline initially was greeted as breaking conventional wisdom about martian mission plans: "Part history, part call to arms, part technical manual, part wishful thinking, The Case for Mars... lays out an ingenious plan. ...one of the most provocative and hopeful documents I have read about the space program in 20 years." The Mars Society continues to grow across many countries with thousands of members interested in space advocacy, particularly how best to encourage the exploration and settlement of Mars. Notable among the Society's members are science-fiction author, Greg Benford, and Academy Award winning director, James Cameron. Astrobiology Magazine had the opportunity to talk with Robert Zubrin about the possibilities for terraforming Mars. Astrobiology Magazine (AM): First off, should Mars be terraformed? Robert Zubrin (RZ): Yes. AM: Does Mars contain all of the elements needed to make the planet habitable, or will we have to import gases, chemicals, etc., from elsewhere? If so, then will Mars always need constant inputs to achieve habitability, or do you think that given enough inputs Mars would reach a tipping point and planetary processes would create a self-sustaining feed-back loop? RZ: It appears that Mars does have all the elements needed for terraforming. The one outstanding question is nitrogen, whose inventory remains unknown. However theory suggests that Mars should have had an initial supply of nitrogen comparable to the Earth, and it seems likely that much of this is still there. AM: How long will terraforming take? When you envision a terraformed Mars, what do you see? RZ: If one considers the problem of terraforming Mars from the point of view of current technology, the scenario looks like this:
That's the scenario, using current technological approaches. However technology is advancing, and 23rd Century humans will not conduct their projects using 21st Century means. They will use 23rd Century means and accomplish the job much faster than anyone today can suppose. So if someone in the 24th Century, living on a fully terraformed Mars, should discover this interview, I believe that she will view it in much the same way as we today look at Jules Verne's lunar mission design. We today look at Verne's ideas and say "Amazing, a man living a hundred years before Apollo foresaw it—and not only that—launched his crew of three from Florida, and returned them in a capsule landing in the Pacific Ocean where they were picked up by a U.S. warship, all as things actually happened. But launching people with heavy artillery—how 19th Century can you get?" So our 24th Century Martian historian studying this interview will smile and say; "Incredible. Here are people 300 years ago talking about terraforming Mars. But doing it with fluorocarbon gases and green plants—how 20th century can you get?" AM: Who should the first human colonists to Mars be and how should they be chosen? Since martian gravity is one-third of Earth's, wouldn't bone and muscle loss, along with radiation, make colonization a one-way journey? What are the implications of what, from an Earth-perspective, is exile? RZ: Life is a one-way trip, and we are all permanently exiled from our past. In that sense Mars colonists, and all colonists, are no different from anyone else. It is just more apparent in their case, as in addition to leaving behind the time of their past, they also leave behind the place. But in so doing, they gain the opportunity to create a world where none existed before, and thus gain a form of immortality that is denied to those who are content to accept the world they are born in. AM: If there's life on Mars, how do we balance the martian right to life with the human impulse to explore and extend our borders? RZ: The basis of ethics needs to be of benefit to humanity. If there is life on Mars, it is microbial, and its interests can in no way be considered as commensurate with human interests. Those who argue otherwise strike a fashionable pose, but deny their arguments every day through their actions. If bacterial interests trump human interests, then mouthwash should be banned, chlorination of water supplies should be banned, and antibiotics should be banned. If bacterial interests trump human interests, then Albert Schweitzer and Louis Pasteur should be denounced for crimes against bacteria. 
Laser altimeter data from Mars interpreted by color representing altitudes and what once may have provided more exotic martian landforms than visible today. Image credit: GSFC/NASA. Now, in saying that ethics must be based in human benefit, we need not deny that preserving valuable environments in important. It is important to save the Amazon rain forest, for example, because a world without an Amazon rain forest would be a poorer inheritance for our descendants than one with one, and the degree of the impoverishment exceeds whatever value might be obtained in the short term from slash and burn agriculture. However, in the case of Mars, the calculation votes the other way, as a terraformed Mars, filled with life, cities, universities, used book stores, and yes, rain forests, would be a vastly richer gift to posterity than the current barren Red Planet. Clearly, just as anyone who proposed transforming the current Earth into a place like Mars would be considered mad, so those who, given the choice, would keep Mars dead rather than make it a place as wonderful as the Earth must have their sanity doubted. There remains only the question of science. Surely we should avail ourselves of the opportunity to study native martian life before we terraform the place. We surely will. Terraforming Mars will be a long term project, and should native martian microbes exist, there will be ample opportunity to study it before terraforming takes place. There will also be opportunity to study how it adapts to warmer, wetter conditions and the presence of terrestrial microbes after terraforming takes place. Furthermore, if Mars actually is terraformed, there will be much more people on Mars to study every aspect of Mars, including both its native and immigrant life. So in fact, our knowledge of martian biota will be increased by terraforming, not decreased. AM: Humans sent to live on Mars will bring with them ideas on how to govern themselves, rules of conduct for living in society, economic motivations, and personality conflicts. How should the colonization of Mars be managed, and how should Mars be governed? Should the colonization of Mars be a cooperative effort among every nation, or should only those that financial contribute be in charge of the operation? RZ: The Founding Fathers of the United States called our infant republic a "Noble Experiment," a place where the grand liberal ideas of the Enlightenment could be given a run, and the idea of a government based on the rights on man could be tested to see if it could succeed in practice. Their Noble Experiment did succeed, and as a result became the model for a new and better form of human social organization worldwide. Mars can, should, and will be a place for numerous new Noble Experiments. The well of human social thought has not yet run dry, nor do I believe that we have yet discovered the ultimate and most humanistic form of society possible. In the 22nd Century, as in the 18th, there will always be people who think they have discovered a better way, and need a place to go where the rules haven't been written yet so they can give their ideas a try. For these, the martian frontier will beckon. Many of their ideas will prove impractical, and their colonies will fail. But some of those who really have a better idea will succeed, and in doing so, light the way forward for all humanity. So, to answer your question, I say that the colonization of Mars should not be managed at all, but be done through the joyful chaos of human freedom. Directory: projects -> marsbugs -> 2004 projects -> Rajinder Sachar Committee projects -> Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study By projects -> Cape Lookout National Seashore Historic Resource Study By projects -> Revolutionizing Climate Modeling – Project Athena: a multi-Institutional, International Collaboration projects -> What is a Hurricane? projects -> General Information projects -> Press Information projects -> 1 Introduction 3 2 Designing an Embedded System 4 2004 -> Editor/Publisher 2004 -> Editor/Publisher Download 226.25 Kb. Share with your friends:
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