Omnibus

My apologies for the long absence. Some wise people -- Chris Anderson, for example, and now Rob Carlson -- have come up with the excellent and synergistic idea of a blog as a way of working on their next book. Blogging about the subject of your previous book, as I was doing here, is a rather less productive approach. So I stopped for a while in order to immerse myself in the current book project, the recently written parts of which have been both historical and biochemical, and thus have kept my mind quite a long way from matters planetary. It's possible that I feel the urge to start again now -- in a slow and no-long-term-commitment sort of way -- in part because I've now reached a more planetary-compatible part of the project.

Also, frankly, after Ischia the news didn't really compel me back. I felt that I, and you, had said more or less all there was to say about the methane and so on. And most of the rest of what was going on was, by comparison, slightly small beer (though the goethite in Gusev is certainly very interesting).

The other reason for coming back now is that I thought I'd want to blog the Huygens descent on Friday, and it would thus be tidy-minded of me to clear up some martian matters first.

So, first off: congratulations to Spirit for a year on site and to Mars Express for a year on orbit, and let's hope Opportunity makes it too. I sort of expected the MERs to last longer than the statutory 90 sols if they landed and checked out OK -- it's always best to define complete success as something that is in fact quite achievable -- but I really didn't imagine they'd make it through the winter, especially not with the temperature sensitive mini-TES systems apparently intact and still functional (not that you'd know it from their website, but then who am I to criticise a lack of updates...). A generous budget and a great team have really paid off well.

The rolling-over-the-surface adventure has been great, and so has the science. As it turns out, I suspect Opportunity would have been able to make it to an outcrop from a lot of landing sites -- but to end up opposite one was something else. Worth noting that, as I understand it (and I really haven't been reading up as thoroughly as I should) the Meridiani deposits aren't utterly sealike; some layers in the crater looked a lot more like sub-aerial dunes that later got soaked in brine.

In other news, the payload for the Mars Science Laboratory has been announced, and is extremely impressive, in fact aggressive, in its development ambitions. CheMin, the compact x-ray diffraction/fluorescence system is a whole new idea and a very brave one. Using a laser ablation system to zap rocks at a distance and read off their composition is also a pretty gutsy approach. In terms of the instruments, this is not a MER follow-on (MER teams have very few instruments on MSL) -- it's something rather grander. (It's also good news for Mike Malin and his merry men, chosen to provide a descent camera and both of the cameras on board -- way to go, PI Ken!)

The ambitious instrumentation is probably just as well. Great as they have been, the MERs haven't managed everything that one might have wanted from them. In particular, it seems to me that the idea of using the mini-TES as a way of scouting out the next target from many metres away has not been as successful as it might have been, perhaps due to bandwidth constraints. In general, the MERs' mineralogy has been rather indistinct; what exactly is all that salty mineral goodness?

So MSL is pleasingly ambitious: indeed, so much so that one has to wonder if it's really a mission that can be done on the '09 timescale. I was talking with someone before Christmas (this year spent happily not in Camden) who suggested that there was a real possibility of MSL slipping to 2011, in which case there might conceivably be a MER reflight in 2009. (That last bit sounds a little optimistic to me, not least because there were no other safe landing sites as good as the two that were taken, and I'd imagine a reflight would not be capable of tackling sites that weren't on the table for the original mission.) It may be that, if people at NASA are as enthused about the MSL payload as, at first blush, I am, they might want to send two of the things - in which case I'd imagine 2011 was pretty much a certainty.

If this delay is upsetting, it's worth remembering that at one point MER, in the form of Athena, was an 01 payload. I doubt there are many on the MER team who think they'd have got good, or possibly any, results if they'd flown a single rover two years earlier. It's likely that the 09 mission is in better shape now than the 01 mission was in 97, but it's still something to bear in mind.

Meanwhile, back on earth, our friends the prokaryotes have been discovered up to some interesting new tricks of martian relevance. Deep in the Mediterranean, they are living in incredibly salty brines that you wouldn't have though they could stand. And in the Pacific, it appears, some of them are actually producing ethane in significant amounts, as well as methane (there's mention of this here: check out the summary and, for a little more detail, the report on site 1227, both pdfs). If that's true, it must surely be worth looking for an ethane line or two on Mars (since no one, as far as I know, thinks that ethane comes from volcanoes or serpentinisation).

Enough for now. As I said (though to whom I've no idea - who reads blogs so long dormant? To people reading on an xml feed, I suppose) I don't know how regularly I'll be posting from here on in, but I'll try and be at least a bit more frequent.

And happy new year. To the rovers too.

Comments

[marrije]

Hurray! You're back! I'm looking forward to trying to follow all you are saying again.

[Neil Halelamien]

Thanks for the update. I hadn't actually heard the specifics about the MSL instrument package before.

[Blue]

I don't know, I think an MER flight to the proposed Valles Marineris Mellas site could still be pretty damn cool...particularly since we now have a better idea of how robust the rovers are!

[Blue]

Or, even better I suppose, EOS chasm!

[Oliver Morton]

I suspect the crosswinds will kill you if you try for the canyons. That was certainly the case in the 04 site selection process. Admittedly, the 04 landings were at a bad time for winds generally (early afternoon). But I think in the canyons all the time is a bad time. Certainly the early mornings are bad, and the 2004 simulations showed the afternoons were bad. No idea if a night landing is feasible.

[Rupert]

Ah, there you are... now, all I need is the Religious Policeman and I'm back up to bloggy strength (wonders about a joke about blog years, and gives up).

You going to the Huygens bash tomorrow? Deadlines permitting, I shall...

R

[jimO]

Glad to see you, and since you provide valuable stuff for free, I'm NEVER ungrateful for all the time you want to take for your personal stuff.

[Charles Schmidt]

Just a few hours to go now as Huygens nears Titan. The view from it fore and aft must be magnificent...

Has Opportunity discovered a meteoroid at Meridiani Planum? I'm an amateur, but even to me this looks like what I think they call tektites that have fallen to earth. You can pick them up in the deserts, especially Antarctica. The mini-TES shows it to be made of metal, (read iron). The pickins' for this type of thing on Mars, especially open places like in Meridiani, would be pretty good, if earth is any comparison. But still, if confirmed, it would be another amazing lucky coincidence for Opportunity.

But I still can't stop thinking about what "real" optical pictures I'll see within 24 hours of Titan. I hope it's not a smoggy day at the surface. Read Zubrin's book, the one after Mars Direct, about humans in space, where he talks about the habitability of Titan's surface which is not as bad as you would first think. The essentials: a very good suit heater, and an old Coke bottle of liquid oxygen with a regulator. Hang glide on Titan with wing slipcovers for your arms and flap away.......
See you on Titan.

Oliver we miss you. Won't you visit more often?

CS in Chicago

[Charles Schmidt]

Two links relevant to the prior post:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/n/345/1N158809950EFF40DIP1912L0M1.HTML

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/mars_object_050113.html

[blair]

Great to hear from you again!

I got Mapping Mars for Christmas (pleasantly surprised to find it on the shelves at my local Waterstones) and loved reading it. It inspired me to try and track down a copy of the 1:5,000,000 Mars Atlas (based on Viking imagery) you talk about a lot. So far I have singularly unsuccesful. I don't suppose anyone out there knows of a site/store/individual who may have a copy for sale?

[Bruce Moomaw]

BBC reported about 2 minutes ago that Green Bank has picked up Huygens' post-entry signal. So far, so good.

[Bruce Moomaw]

As for Mars exploration, I'm back from attending the first 3-day meeting last week of the new Mars Human and Exploration Committee Strategic Roadmap Committee -- the very first of NASA's new 13 Strategic Roadmap Committees to meet in order to start preparing recommendations to NASA's new Architecture Integration Office to work out the overall guiding architecture for NASA's future annual budget requests. While this first meeting was devoted mostly to listening to presentations on the nature of the overall program and of individual projected missions, the Committee's conversations indicated pretty firmly that it has already reached at least one definite conclusion regarding a change in the nature of the upcoming Mars Exploration Program. There was also a fair amount of secondary news.

As a special torment, I will withhold all this from you until I finish pounding out my report on the subject -- a shorter verion of which will go to either the "Astronomy Magazine" website of to "Sky and Telescope", with a full version (around 15 pages long) then going to SpaceDaily. I will say that I think you'll find the new news mostly (though not entirely) pleasant.

[Bruce Moomaw]

It has now been confirmed that Hugyens survived its landing, and is still sending back a signal an hour after Doppler measurements indicated its landing (at 4:35 AM Pacific time). The only remaining question is how many of the experiments worked.

[Joe Mansfield]

The initial pictures are intriguing but ESA seems to be following their pattern of limiting release of the data - any idea if they are going to trickle feed only chosen snippets to the public in the same way that they are handling the Mars Express data?

Maybe I'm missing something but NASA seems to do a much better job of just simply making raw data available very quickly indeed.

Not that I begrudge the core teams on this the privilege of having it exclusively to themselves after a 25 or so year wait but I'm curious about ESA's plans for the data in the longer term.

And finally, Oliver - I really do hope you continue to post, however infrequently, this is a fantastic blog and I can't wait for your next book.

[EricR]

Oliver,

In all honesty, I have very little exposure or undersanding of which you blog -- but much interest!

Your insider perspective is presented with such clear thinking and writing has kept me returning for months, waiting for you to throw us another bone!

Like, hint-hint-hint, your take on the Huygens descent, lost data channel, etc.

Thanks!

[Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey]

To celebrate the (Earth) year of MER operations, JPL had a day of talks. You can catch them on streaming video at C-SPAN, see http://www.c-span.org/VideoArchives.asp?z1=&PopupMenu_Name=Science/Technology&CatCodePairs=Issue,ST; to watch it. Or search their archives for "NASA" or "Mars." (They only keep 'em in the archive for a few weeks, so look quickly.)

Anyway, the first hour was just what you'd expect: speeches by the lab director, project managers, Washington officials, et al.

But for the second hour, they lined up storytellers from all levels of the project, and did "Mars Stories We've Never Told," which was more fun. Oliver, I recommend to you the last speaker, Steve Collins, who starts about 1 hour and 40 minutes into the video. Steve's tale repeats a major theme of your book: the shift in perception as a set of scientific obeservations, "a bunch of numbers," becomes a real place.

[Del Miller]

Glad you're back Oliver, we've missed you.

And no, I don't have RSS notification...I just check the sight every few days thinking you'll have to come back sometime.

Now isn't that pathetic.

So, do you think the the surface of Titan is simply a big sheet of ice poking up through the organic deposits?

[Leo Enright]

Thanks to Bill Higgins for a fine recommendation ("Mars Stories We've Never Told"). I've been so caught up with Titan that I didn't catch the MER celebrations. Steve Collins is a real gent - he spent an hour briefing me on the role of quaternions in attitude control as part of a T.V. special on William Rowan Hamilton, the Irish mathematician who made it all possible!!!

[Sarah Vermeersch]

Oliver!
Sorry to be so non-scientific in my comment but I don't seem to be able to find an e-mail address for you! We went to the European School together for about 10 years (remember?!). Are you in the UK? Could we meet for a drink? Would love to catch up (20 years later!). I'd like to make a (very very short) film about you.
Hope to hear from you!
Sarah