Come and Learn the Art of Exploration

The author takes a selfie with the Curiosity Rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one building over from Curiosity's Mission Control where he worked during the summer of 2012. We hope to give those who attend our event on May 27, 2017 a taste of what running a space mission like Curiosity is really like.

Last year I was fortunate to be successful in my bid to secure an Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation Early Career Researcher Award. In addition to allowing me to expand the Curiosity (Mars Science Laboratory)-related work that we do in my group, this particular award has a youth outreach component that we're about to roll out for the first time. I think we've put together a really interesting day if you want to get an idea of what it's like to do real planetary exploration. I know that my team and I are really looking forward to sharing our enthusiasm with those students who join us on Saturday, May 27!

Some of you may have navigated to this post in order to get more information on the event, so this will serve as exposition. Over the course of six hours, from 9:30 AM to 3:30 PM, we hope to give you all a little taste of what science-driven mission design is like. The "science-driven" component is important because, where space exploration was at one point focused purely on pushing boundaries (what we call "footprints and flags"), the modern version has an animating purpose in mind, and that purpose is the science that is returned. Think of it as the difference between John Cabot's "Matthew" and Charles Darwin's "Beagle." We will start with how you select a landing site before describing how you go about equipping a robot for the journey and then how that robot is operated on another planet to actually accomplish science goals. In each case, it will be you and your fellow students who make the choices.

A Surreal Summer

 A photo I took of myself last summer in Pasadena, CA while working on the Mars Science Laboratory Mission which appears on the cover of today's St. John's Telegram. Can you tell that I'd been doing Mars Time for a whole month by that point? In some ways, this summer has been almost as surreal as last summer.

It has been a long slog of a summer, but today there's a fallish tinge in the air here in Toronto and I can feel the semester beginning to creep up on me once again. One thing I never really grasped about this job when I took it was how many different components there are to being a prof.  I will admit that I was certainly aware of each of those things but not of how much time they can eat up, collectively.

Getting Ready for the Cape

MSL Arrives at Launch Complex 41 inside its 5m fairing just before dawn on November 3. In the days ahead, this fairing will be mounted atop an Atlas-V 541 EELV for a launch to Mars no earlier than November 25. 

After some consideration, I've decided to bite the bullet, take a chance and head on down to Cape Canaveral next week to help see off Mars Science Lab (MSL). Better known as the Curiosity Rover, MSL is an exciting mission to Mars that will take a close-up look at the km-thick layered deposits inside Gale Crater. It's an exciting place to try for and the rover team is looking forward to a successful launch, landing and the scientific results that will be returned. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the spectacular night launch of Phoenix in 2008. So this will be my first launch, assuming that delays don't push the launch back until after I need to fly home.  While I have some idea what to expect from video and images, I have no idea what the experience will be like in person.

Review: Kessler's Martian Summer

A portion of the cover of Andrew Kessler's Book describing his experiences as an embedded author on the 2008 Mars Phoenix Mission.

What can I say about Andrew Kessler's Book "Martian Summer?" First off, it's a very different read from a very different perspective compared to many of the previous write-ups about space missions. Instead of detailing technical details and relying exclusively on the views of a member of the science team or the P.I. (Principal Investigator), the story provides Kessler himself as a bridge between the reader and the mission. In addition, the conversational tone makes it seem almost as if the story is a novelization of events. This is really where the text succeeds, for even though it is marred here and there with minor inaccuracies, it does one exceptional thing right: the text captures the feel of working in mission control better than any other. The result is an engrossing read that really brought the experience of my own Martian Summer back to me.

Let's go on a Mars Cruise!

A photograph of  the residential cruise ship "The World," docked in Melbourne as captured by wikipedia user VirtualSteve. Is this a good home for Mars Mission Control?

In the run up to this year's analogue space mission deployments at UWO, I'm reliving the good old days of 2008 vicariously through Andrew Kessler's account of the Phoenix Mission. In his book "Martian Summer," Kessler captures in plain language the energy as well as the highs and lows of working at Mission Control for a Martian Mission. I'll have more to say about the book once I finish reading it, but there was one early comment of his about an interesting countermeasure to working on Mars Time that piqued my interest. I'll get to that in a moment, but first let me describe what we mean by "Mars Time."

Martian Fog Update

Disney's vision of a plant on Mars via Paleo-Future. I can only hope that I'm growing the Martian version of our tree of knowledge.

By design, one of the main jobs of a Scientist is to add to our body of knowledge. Typically, we're all working away quietly on this tiny piece or another of a very large tree. Often, the particular leaf that we are adding is esoteric and may therefore be of interest only to a small group or even just ourselves. But sometimes, we get the chance to work on a finely-filigreed golden leaf of a project, or on a major branch. It is on those projects that a wider swath of the world takes note.

Bob Richards' PSERF, March 25, 2011

Bob Richards, a "Space Dragon" who wants to expand the reach of the human race... 

and make a profit doing so!

In his talk last Friday, Bob Richards, a silicon valley space entrepreneur referred to the folks that blog about him. By virtue of this entry in my PSERF handbook, I suppose that now includes me. I cannot admit that I know the man well*, but he is an interesting fellow and his heart seems to be in the right place. For this special speaker, we met in a special location; not in the Biological and Geological Sciences Building, but over in the Ivey school of business. This was an appropriate choice, as Bob's expertise is in the area of space business. His primary goal these days? Expanding the economic sphere of the Earth from Geosynchronous orbit out by a factor of ten to encompass the Moon.

The presentation was free-flowing and Bob stayed afterwards to chat with several of us at the University's Graduate Club. While he spoke without slides, his talk was not unusual fare for PSERF which has attracted interesting speakers of all types, from experts on Space Weaponry through discussions of early cartography and the "inside baseball" story of science-driven space missions. Largely, I'm getting the impression that PSERF exists mainly to expand our concept of what we can do with these planetary science degrees of ours. In that vein, Bob had a great deal to offer us by describing in detail his experience with the emerging field of private space exploration.

Fog on Mars

One of the things about Martian Surface Missions that appeals so much to me is how no other place in the solar system is so distant, yet so familiar and comprehensible on a human scale. Other places make your imagination run wild. Underneath the ice of Europa? Skimming the rings of Saturn? Standing on distant Pluto? They make for great art, and we can picture the locations, but their appeal is mostly intellectual, not guttural. But what about Mars? Exotic? Yes. But still it remains within the realm of places that feel familiar, where we could picture ourselves sitting and watching a sunset in person:

The sun setting over the columbia hills in Gusev Crater, Mars. If the sunset weren't blue, we could easily mistake this scene for one shot on Earth, say in Morocco or the Gobi Desert, or perhaps even the badlands of Alberta.

PSURF, January 14, 2011

This isn't a review since, well, PSURF #2 of 2011 was actually me! CPSX was kind enough to record the talk for me and you can watch it by downloading the avi from this page:

http://cpsx.uwo.ca/NewsAndEvents/recordings.html

(direct link to avi here)

The title was "The 2008 Phoenix Lander: A Scientist's Perspective on a Space Mission." My intent in the talk was to shed some light on what goes on inside of a space mission and how they are put together, rather than focusing on the science results or engineering design. 

Some thoughts on Live at York U's Interview with Jim Whiteway

Last night, the Astronomy.fm program "Live at York U" had an interesting interview with my current postdoctoral supervisor, Dr. Jim Whiteway. In astronomical circles, Jim is best known as the Co-Investigator (Co-I, in the jargon of the business) of the Lidar and MET packages on board the Phoenix Lander, but he also heads the Centre for Research in the Earth and Space Sciences at York University. By way of full disclosure I've had the opportunity to collaborate with him on and off since 2006/2007 or so and have been working for him for nine months now. There are a couple of points that he mentioned or that came up in discussion between Paul Delaney (Director of the York University Observatory) and Host Robert Berthiaume that bear repeating or commenting.

First, there's the subject of planetary science in Canada. Jim mentioned that he had always wanted to go into planetary science when he was younger, but noticing that there was little planetary science work being done in Canada at the time, he elected to go into Optics/LIDAR work instead. While it remains difficult to find full time academic work in this field, he feels that things have improved significantly. Graduate students can now pursue planetary or space studies at places like the University of New Brunswick, the University of Toronto, York University and, of course, the University of Western Ontario where my future supervisor, Dr. Gordon Osinski, is deeply involved with both the Canadian Lunar Research network and the Center for Planetary Science and Exploration. There are also smaller projects available here and there from Memorial University to Dalhousie, to McGill to the University of Alberta. To enhance all of this the Canadian Space Agency has been developing our strength in hosting the world's researchers at planetary analog sites. The most famous of these is the Houghton Impact Structure up on Devon Island where NASA, CSA and the Mars Society (Amongst many others) have been known to test equipment. The astrobiological exploration and research at Pavillion Lake also got a lot of good publicity this year. To cap it off, NSERC has recently created a program to fund students and postdocs called CREATE, and the CSA is hopeful that several new research chairs in planetary and space science will be announced later this year.

So it seems that things are on the upswing in Canadian Planetary Science. One of Jim's comments in particular was music to my ears: that Canadian students should consider this field. After being told time and time again by academics in Canada that planetary science was a dying field and I'd best jump ship before my career sank beneath the waves, it feels good that someone is willing to be optimistic in a public way.

However, is Canada the best place for students to learn their craft? This brings me to a second point raised by Delaney and Berthiaume, that students do not seem to have been significantly involved on the Canadian side of Phoenix. Unfortunately this is largely true. There are, of course, exceptions but these are mostly students brought in after the fact to analyze data and not expected to participate in science team discussions or the mission operations. Contrast this with the attitude of the Americans. I (Arizona) worked as a Strategic Science Planner, as did my fellow grad students Doug Archer (Arizona) and Selby Cull (Washington). Many of the IDE/ISE's were also undergrad students for the SSI, in particular. These students gave presentations at the science meetings and helped to decide the course of operations. Some even put in long hours building and validating space hardware. One case in particular bears mention: Rigel Woida, an undergraduate in the Optical Sciences Department at the University of Arizona was the principal engineer on the organic-free blank used to test the TEGA instrument in flight! So obviously there were more opportunities to participate for those working south of the border.

Why the difference between the Canadian and American teams? Part of it has to do with the profile of the mission. I do get the impression that Phoenix was a bigger deal in Canada than it was in the USA, thus the Americans were able to take more of a "gamble" on using students in key roles. Even so there are several upsides to such a gamble. First, costs are lowered as you get a highly skilled workforce willing to accept little pay for the prestige of working on a space mission. Secondly, you are helping to develop the field and build a cadre of young researchers with mission experience who can go on to plan and operate missions of their own later on. In this sense, I feel that Canada missed out a bit on Phoenix.

This brings me to my last comment, a small piece of advice. After the interview, master's student Berthiaume expressed concern about graduate students who might base their entire thesis on a space mission that has yet to fly. Delaney felt that it's no different from researchers in other fields who might base their theses on experiments that have yet to run. Still, I feel there is a significant difference between the two areas. Rarely, in the case of a lab experiment, does a failure so spectacular occur that you cannot repair the equipment and try again. It may take a bit more time and a bit more money, but you aren't ruined. However, if the spacecraft you based your thesis on crashes, the mission it was to take on won't soon be repeated and you will have to start all over again. Thus, we were counselled at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory not to depend upon mission success for getting our PhD's. That piece of good advice has been followed by many, and with resources like the PDS making data from past missions publicly available there is no shortage of research topics to choose from. As Jim mentioned, one dirty little secret about space missions is that the science team can some times be so caught up in running a mission that they do not get to their data until years later (we're still publishing Phoenix data to this day). That means that there are lots of opportunities for significant and ground-breaking student projects to participate in if you talk to a team that has just finished with a mission.

The Role of Secrecy in Science

For the first time that I can remember, a story about data embargoes for a space mission has made the New York Times. A data embargo is an agreement signed between a space agency and a mission science team which grants the science team exclusive rights to the data for a fixed period of time. The specific case in question involves the Kepler Mission, a NASA-led spacecraft in an earth-trailing orbit (at the L5 Lagrangian point) which is searching for earth-sized extrasolar planets. As first reported in Nature, the science team has identified about 700 potential exoplanet candidates which, under the terms of the agreement the team signed with NASA, must be made public within one year of discovery. But because of bad weather and launch delays for other space telescopes, they have been unable to confirm all those putative detections within that time. As such, they are seeking an extension on their data embargo. In a compromise have been granted the right to hold back their best candidates for one more year.

As space missions are funded by taxpayers, you might wonder why data embargoes exist at all. In fact, a case can be made that their presence can impede scientific progress since it limits new data to a small pool of people for a certain amount of time. If the entire scientific community could be brought in, progress would certainly be faster. Furthermore, many space missions excite the imaginations of the public who ultimately provided the funding that makes them possible. Sharing with these people is an obligation that will only help our future prospects. After all, a vociferously supportive public and scientific community increases the likelihood that more missions will take place in the future.

This desire for openness must be balanced against providing an incentive for the Science Team to participate. Mission planning can consume a great deal of a scientist's time for years before launch. This requirement will delay or supplant work that would lead to publications, the keys to career advancement. Furthermore, once the mission starts producing science, the team who put so much work in ahead of the mission is in the worst possible place to analyze their results. They must spend most of their time running the mission, making scientific decisions, and preparing the cleaned up and polished data for public release. This production of RDRs (Reduced Data Records) from the raw data received from the spacecraft (EDRs, or Experimental Data Records) is a long and tedious task, in and of itself.

If the data were freely available as soon as they were collected and anyone could publish immediately, why would anyone make the effort to join a mission team, knowing what it could cost? Without the carrot of a guaranteed first paper, possibly in a premier journal such as Science or Nature, it would be difficult to attract top talent and the quality of those scientists working on the mission and the decisions they make would be lower. Thus the collected data products would also suffer without embargoes.

A balance is required between the needs of the scientific community, the science team and the public at large. For Mars missions, typically EDRs of images are released within a few days and public release of data to NASA's planetary storehouse, the Planetary Data System (or PDS, as we typically refer to it) for dissemination to the scientific community occurs at the 6-month mark. This 6-month embargo is barely adequate to give the scientists a head start, and often in the course of a mission, you can see a gradual change over the first few months in the make-up of the operations team as the experienced scientists step back to write their papers and younger members of the team step into their roles. Often these younger scientists are graduate students, as I was when I worked on Phoenix.

This brings up the potential conflict that can exist amongst the members of a science team. As there are different levels of participation and different roles within the science team, there is also a method for determining how publishing rights will be meted out within the team. After all, a senior scientist who dedicated five years to a project and who has considerable duties during the science phase would not want someone who was added at the last minute and has more free time to write up a paper in Science or Nature. Thus, the the publications that will result are typically codified in advance of the beginning of the science phase in a document called "The Rules of the Road." This document lists the collaboration level of each science team member and what he or she is permitted to publish. For instance, for Phoenix, the main Science Paper announcing the results was restricted to the senior level of researchers, the Co-Investigators (or Co-I's). In the later JGR special issue, any science team member was permitted to contribute (Disclosure: I helmed a paper in the JGR special issue and contributed to one of the subsidiary Science papers for Phoenix).

The peanalties for the science team members breaking an embargo are serious. While not all missions require formal NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) as Kepler did, team members are well aware that infractions could result in the termination of their participation on the mission and their funding, and even disqualify their participation on future missions. Given the prestige of serving on a mission, this is usually incentive enough.

Embargoes can also affect those on the outside in the scientific community. For instance, publication of results in a peer-reviewed journal can take upwards of a year from submission to publication. Thus every day counts. Often, new discoveries will be announced, somewhat informally, at press conferences and at trade conventions. More then a few outside scientists attempted to publish in peer review the material released at these conferences and conventions for Phoenix while the embargo was still in effect. Mostly, the editors refused to accept these papers - after all, the authors did not collect the data they were reporting, and were not experts on its usage. However, unfortunately, at least one paper did get through and became the first record of one of our instruments to occur in the literature. It seems unlikely that the authors of this paper would be asked to participate in a mission in the future.

The public reaction to full disclosure can also be a source of worry. For instance, when I was on the Huygens Mission working for the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer in 2005, an accidental release of the image library resulted in internet bloggers providing the first processed versions, many of which made it onto the pages of newspapers. These bloggers did not have the calibration data from the instrument and thus could not eliminate many of the artifacts and properly balance the colour in the way that we could. Thus an incorrect record was widely disseminated. As you can expect, the P.I. of the instrument who had devoted almost 17 years of his life to getting these 3 hours of data from the surface of Titan, was not impressed.

Many, especially those on the outside, would argue that secrecy is anathema to good science. However, a certain amount is important if we are to keep the quality of mission data at its peak. Those who participate are giving up their time to use their talents to bring back the best data possible and are deserving, at the very least, of our respect. They also deserve the time needed to get it right. I do believe that the current state of affairs with respect to the public is very fair. In terms of the Scientific community, I believe we need to continue to work to make space missions as inclusive as possible. The more talent we have working inside of the embargoes, the better our results will be. At all costs, we need to avoid the impression of space missions as an exclusive club where who you know is more important then the quality of your work.

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As a note, the JPL planetary photojournal provides thousands of images that have been publically released. These images have been processed by the best and should be your first stop when exploring the solar system or looking for something to include in a presentation.

Astrobiological Disparity: A Commentary on the International Year of Biodiversity

From left to right: Deinoccocus radiodurans, a hardy extremophile capable of life in nuclear reactors, middle, the strange body plan of the now-extinct cambrian animal Opabinia Regalis (As envisioned by Nobu Tamura), an afican wild cat (as photographed by Wikipedia user Sonelle). General Sherman, a sequoiadendron, the tallest tree in the world at 275 feet.

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, following up 2009, the International Year of Astronomy. This makes it a particularly good time to discuss the field that links these two subjects, Astrobiology. Much of astrobiological work today occurs along two linked themes. The first is assessing habitability and the potential for life elsewhere in the Universe. This is what we are trying to do by following the water on Mars. However, this endeavour cannot proceed without input from the second theme, understanding the origins of life and its early development on the earth.

Unfortunately, both of these themes face a fundamental problem. Even though there is great diversity between extant forms of life on Earth, there is remarkably little disparity, from a cosmic perspective. This difference is a subtle, but important one. While diversity is a measure of the number of different forms in a collection of organisms (usually taken as the number of different species, or non-reproductively mixing groups), disparity is an expression of the degree of differentiation between these forms often in terms of body plans and survival strategies. So a collection of 500 species of shrimp is more diverse, but less disparate then a collection of 100 species made up of plants, fish, crustaceans and plankton. Notably, neither measure takes into account any measures of the success of a particular species in terms of number of organisms, range, species longevity, etc.

Since we only have one example of a planet with life, it is worth asking: how disparate is life on Earth? While there may be as many as 100 million different species present on the planet today (most remaining as yet undiscovered), these can be divided into just three domains of life based upon the form of their constitutive cells. These domains are Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucarya. Yet even these large meta-groups have inter-relationships. Eucarya, the domain of which we and nearly all other macroscopic life are a part, is thought to be the result of a beneficial symbiosis between an Archaean and a Bacterium at some time between 1.7 and 2.7 billion years ago. More fundamentally, all three domains are based on the replicative abilities of a single polymer, DNA and share a common ancestor. Thus in terms of strategies for propagation, the disparity of life on Earth is zero!


The three domains of life with Archea in Green, Eucaryotes in Red and Bacteria in Blue. Note that all three domains share a common ancestor which would be located at the center of the tree. The close relationship between the Archaea and Eucarya is shown as a larger subgroup before linking back to the last universal common ancestor.

Part of the reason for this could be the surprising observation that while diversification increases in time, disparity actually tends to decline. For instance, Stephen J. Gould observes that the number of different body plans (loosely equivalent to the classification level of phyla) in animals present just after the Cambrian Explosion is significantly greater than today. Analogously, it has been hypothesized that several different biopolymers, including RNA, PNA and TNA might have been able to perform functions similar to that which is played by DNA today. All may have been present on the early earth, but DNA, having advantages, outcompeted all of these other forms. The history since has been written by the victorious molecule.

However, this also suggests that even on the earth there may have been greater disparity in the past and that had conditions been different, then the balance could have been tipped in favour of other forms or strategies. As a result, we are left contemplating not just where in the Universe we might find life that has been successful on Earth, but where other kinds of life, as yet unknown, might be possible. There are some theoretical bounds we can put on such a problem; however, I expect that this is an area in which we will be surprised by discovery in the future. As many prognosticators are aware, it is always a dangerous proposition to define the limits of the possible.

Instead, we can proceed by determining what factors will tend to improve the odds of life beyond the earth, based on our limited earthly experience. For instance, liquid water certainly helps the chemistry that we require to function. The presence of certain elements in particular Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorous and Sulphur (collectively referred to as CHNOPS) are also helpful, allowing for systems that can replicate and store energy. Similarly the presence of an energy source to power cellular reactions is critical; both chemosynthesis and photosynthesis, in which energy is gained from chemical disequilibrium or radiation, are practiced on the Earth. This has led to the hypothesis that the powerful oxidants found in the martian soil by the Phoenix Lander could represent a power source for a martian biochemistry.


Above: a soil sample is collected for analysis. On Mars, solar UV causes oxidants to form in the soil, building up to as much as 1 percent by weight of the upper layer. Perchlorate, discovered by the MECA instrument aboard Phoenix represents a potential power source for chemosynthesis, if there is an organism available to metabolize it.

But the most important factor seems to be time. Over time, organisms evolve to move into new habitats that were previously empty. To illustrate this, consider that despite the incredible biodiversity on the Earth, certain niches remain unfilled. Why do the deserts or the summits of mountains not flower with plants and animals? Turn the question around and ask why the continental surface was barren half billion years ago? And why, before that, no animals, plants or larger creatures beyond bacterial colonies filled the seas?

It is worth keeping in mind that all of these biomes, including the terrestrial abodes not filled today, are far more clement locations for the kind of life we know then exists on Mars, Enceladus or Europa. That these are the leading candidates for life elsewhere in our Solar System underscores not only the difficulty of our Astrobiological quest, but also the fragility of life on our planet. It requires that we protect something so rare in all its diverse forms. This is the realization that is at the foundation of the year of Biodiversity.


From left to right: Earth, Mars, Europa and Enceladus (showing water plumes)

As a final thought let us consider what the evolution of intelligence on the Earth has meant for the survival of life on Earth. The fragility of life relates directly to three factors: environmental variation, diversity/disparity and range.

The effects of the first two factors are simple to grasp. The greater the frequency and magnitude of the variation in environmental conditions, the more difficult it is to maintain a stable system. Likewise, the more diversity and disparity there is amongst organisms inhabiting a particular region, the more likely that one or more species will be able to deal with the environmental variations that do occur.

Range, however, is the most crucial. By spreading itself over a large territory, life cannot be extinguished easily by isolated events. This is the advantage of large animals. We cannot tolerate the extremes that bacteria can, but we can deal with inclement conditions by adapting or moving on. Migration is a particularly good example of an adaptation unavailable to simpler life which allows the organism to derive benefits from a much larger range.

Intelligence is by far the best known means of increasing the range of a species. Through our use of tools and clothing, human beings now inhabit the entire planet and can claim a range in pressure, temperature, salinity, pH, you name it - larger than that of any other organism, bacteria included. As such, the Intelligence habitable zone (IHZ) for a solar system housing intelligent life is limited only by the availability of raw materials and energy; aside from politics and economics, there is no reason why humans could not establish a permanent presence on Europa or even further out in the solar system.

As such, we are the first organism produced by our planet with the capability to outlive the death of our Sun, four billion years hence. Thus spaceflight represents the most important adaptation ever produced by life on Earth, and it is an adaptation that we must not lose if we are to preserve life in our corner of the universe.


With the emergence of intelligent life, the habitable zone (HZ) increases in size. This larger Intelligence Habitable Zone (IHZ) shows how through the use of spaceflight and nuclear energy generation, it is possible to spread life to any location with sufficient raw materials, mainly water ice. Discarding waste heat is a difficulty which corresponds to the left edge of the purple trapezoid, but the right edge has no well-defined boundary.

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For an interesting introduction to some of the central questions posed by Astrobiology, I highly recommend the book Rare Earth (most recently, 2003) by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. For a more advanced read, try Lunine’s Astrobiology (2005), a tome well-worth close study. Those looking for background on questions surrounding the initial emergence and diversification of animals (more generally “complex metazonans”) are advised to consider Stephen J. Gould’s Wonderful Life (1990). As a note on the images, I have selected NASA or Wikipedia media wherever possible and have made an effort to attribute the base images. If I have missed something, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me and I will fix it! With the exception of the Phoenix and planetary images, assume all image content is covered under: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License.

Planetary Scientist, now at York University

So, I can now confirm that I have joined York University in the department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering. I have now been working for Jim Whiteway for almost two weeks on the water cycle of the Martian Arctic.

I've got to say, it feels good to be back working in Planetary Science. This topic in particular is of great interest to me, as my PhD dissertation subject was also the martian arctic, specifically, how the sun interacts with ice and dust there to provide places where organic molecules or even life could persist, and the larger problem of determining how much water is available. This is a big problem, as water is a key component for life as we know it.

However, the interactions of water vapor and the martian surface are strange from the perspective of the terrestrial climate scientist. Clouds forming close to the surface have many characteristics of cirrus clouds on the earth, as seen by Lidar analysis. But they look for all the world like convective cells:



Animate This Image to see martian clouds forming by condensing onto rising dust!

[Animation created by the author from images taken by the Surface Stereo Imager on sol 112 of the Phoenix Mision. Credit: JPL/NASA/Texas A&M University/University of Arizona. The image contains information from both the blue and red filters and has been enhanced, hence the stretched colour]

The regolith is also so dry that it sops up water like a sponge and inhibits the movement of vapor. This effectively cuts off the interaction between the atmospheric water vapor and the ice table, just a few centimeters below the surface.

Do all these inputs come together to form a habitable environment? And what do the results of the Phoenix mission have to say about the amount of water stored below the surface? This information is critical for any future mission to Mars, especially any manned mission.

I've got a year to find out, as my contract runs until December 2010. We're going to run some numeric simulations, do some lab experiments and maybe even visit a Mars Analogue site. With a little luck I'll have some interesting stuff to share with you all here and next year at DPS or AGU!

It's good to be back!

* Note, if you liked the animation above, drop by my website, http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jmoores/photos.htm for a look at all the animations of the atmosphere taken with the SSI over the course of the Phoenix Mission looking straight up (Zenith) or outwards, just above the horizon (SupraHorizon). You can see the falling snow, along with several different types of cloud, and interesting billows of dust. Happy hunting!

Phoenix Phone Home?

Now that we're finally coming out of the harsh and deep Martian arctic winter, the engineers at JPL will soon be making an attempt to contact the Phoenix Lander. Sometime in January or February (at the time of writing) the Goldstone 70-m antenna will be trained skyward to tune into the Deep Space Network, hoping for a signal relayed off of the Mars Odyssey or Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). But how likely is a successful contact? And even if contact is successful, what then?

The big question on everyone's mind is whether or not the lander even survived the winter. In the Martian arctic, just like in the arctic here on earth, winter is greeted with increasingly short days and eventually the long night of the solstice. And on Mars, the winter lasts almost twice as long as on the Earth. As a consequence, winter temperatures above 60 degrees of latitude plummet to below the frost point of Carbon Dioxide. Since the bulk of the martian atmosphere is composed of this gas, it condenses out into a layer up to several meters thick. This layer is called the Seasonal Polar Cap and contrasts with the permanent or perennial polar cap which is made of water ice. You can see the progression in this series of HST images: http://www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/detail/nasaNAS~4~4~16147~119568:Seasonal-Changes-in-Mars--North-Pol.

This seasonal cap is thought to be made up partly of a fluffy frost, but also contains thick slab ice in places. Such a deposit could mechanically damage parts of the lander, especially in more delicate places like the solar panels. Furthermore, deprived of so-called keep-alive heating in the long, dark polar night, most of the electrical components will have dropped far below their temperature design tolerances. Optical components are particularly vulnerable, as are electrical connections not rated for this degree of cold.

But this is not the worst that slab ice can do. This transparent layer can also cause severe disruptions in the underlying bed. By trapping incoming solar radiation which is readily absorbed by the dark regolith, evaporation can occur at the base. The resulting high pressure layer of carbon dioxide gas is unstable and eventually will cause the overlying ice to buckle and crack explosively. This geyser-like eruption of gas and entrained regolith is called a sublimation spider (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_003114_0930) and if one formed near the lander it would be bad news. The lander could be mechanically disrupted, or the resulting regolith streak could cover the solar panels, leaving a till that would prevent them from capturing solar radiation once the ice sublimated away.

Our current state of understanding of the lander's condition is sketchy. While the HiRISE camera on MRO has recently obtained some imagery of the lander and area (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_014393_2485), the contrast is still insufficient to tell if Phoenix is mechanically sound. We also won't know much more for several weeks, since MRO has been chasing a computer bug which has prevented science operations since late August.

But let's, for argument's sake, assume that the solar panels are intact and still generating power come January. What can we expect? For starters, the spacecraft will likely be hurting. Many of the instruments may be damaged, some fatally. The SSI and RAC optics may be cracked, allowing dust into their interiors. The LIDAR may also be internally damaged and unable to produce a beam or analyze the results. The Robotic Arm Joints may no longer function. MECA and TEGA may be more robust, but most of their cells are already used up, and they probably would require more power to be run then will be available in the spacecraft's weakened state. Remember that when the lander ceased communications in 2008 after 152 sols, it was not yet even northern equinox. Still, power levels and temperatures had already fallen below what was sustainable for a solar-powered mission.

Additionally, the spacecraft will be highly confused. With the cold and lack of power, it is likely that the on-board computers have rebooted countless times. Thus it is unlikely that the spacecraft has any idea what the time or date will be. Since Phoenix was the first interplanetary spacecraft designed without a dedicated direct-to-earth connection, it must rely on orbiter overflights for communicating with Earth. Each of these lasts only a few minutes every couple of hours. But since the lander has no idea where and when it is, Phoenix will not know when these overflights will occur. Thus it will start transmitting in a search pattern, saving up enough battery power to transmit, trying for contact, and then shutting back down. To make matters worse, given the high latitude of the lander, not all overflights present a good communications opportunity. Often, the orbiters barely rise above the horizon.

In the best of cases, we will make contact. But do not expect a return to science operations. While I am available, I don't expect a call from Pasadena to take up my strategic science planner's job on Phoenix again. However, that simple beep of recognition is a valuable sign, and if that's all we get, it will still be greeted by smiles and celebration. It shows that it is possible for a spacecraft to hunker down and survive at high latitudes on Mars. That information alone opens up new possibilities for exploration.

If we are extraordinarily lucky, it might be possible to get some data on the state of health, or even some SSI images. These simple command sequences, called "runouts" can be run with modest manpower as there will not be time to assemble many people before winter closes in again. Thus this represents the absolute best we can hope for. We've got our fingers crossed: here's to hoping that our baby made it through.