MainlyMartian

Worldcon

Next week I'll be up at this year's World Science Fiction Convention, Interaction in Glasgow. More than happy to meet any of you who might be there. My programme items are:

The Pros and Cons of Blogging Science, Friday at 11.00

How Have Worlds Changed, Friday at 14:00

Exploring the Planets, Friday at 15:30

A reading on Saturday at 11.00

and "The Long Tail": Economics of a Post-Scarcity World, Saturday at 15:30

I'm particularly chuffed to have a reading. I've never given a public reading before; I'll probably offer a little bit of the work in progress, and my one piece of science fiction. I imagine it will be packed, as the only competition is some bloke called Pratchett...

Any input any of you have for any of the panels (especially you, Chris, out there in RSS land) most welcome. The Exploring the Planets event will give me the opportunity to question David Southwood, so let me know if there's anything you want raised about ESA. (I wonder whether he read this?)

I have no idea whether I'll be blogging while I'm up there. It seems a fairly sure thing that Cheryl will be, though.

It's a very long time since I've been to a worldcon (I'm not a regular at any type of con), and I have to say I'm looking forward to it quite a lot. They really are the most remarkable events, organised on a wonderfully dedicated volunteer basis, and offering everything from insight into future pandemics to the psychology of isolation to cargo cults to belly dancing lessons to war trains made of lego to the open source approach to science to whether lesbianism in genre TV is progressive to the fractured narrative and the causal world to Simon Conway Morris and Jack Cohen on extraterrestrial life to how to mosh, slam and stage dive. All human life is here...

Mumma's methane

At the September meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science, which is rather pleasingly in Cambridge this year, Mike Mumma will be presenting some very interesting sounding methane data. The abstract is here. The key idea is that the rate of methane production is a great deal higher than calculations based on the theoretical atmospheric lifetime would suggest

Our differential extractions for methane implied strong latitudinal gradients - these are contrary to predictions if photochemistry limits the lifetime of methane on Mars, but instead require local release and a much shorter lifetime. The lifetime against destruction cannot be much longer than equator-to-pole transport times imposed by the Hadley circulation (weeks). A shorter lifetime requires that estimated production rates be revised upwards commensurately.

If the methane had a long lifetime, it would be spread evenly across the face of the planet. It doesn't, so it has a short lifetime (possibly because of catalysed interactions with surface oxidants, or oxidants on dust). And for a given total amount of atmospheric methane a shorter liftime means a higher rate of production. The 2,000 cows have reinforcements.

Neither the absolute rate or the implication that production must be regional in themselves argue for or against biological production. Geothermal sources are regional too (though if the rate is really high, you'd have to wonder why the hotspot doesn't show up in the infrared). Sushil Atreya will be looking into some of the possibilities at the same session of the meeting. Interestingly, Atreya's abstract suggests that some of Mumma's data show a significantly higher level than PFS or the Krasnopolsky team reported.

Also interestingly the Mars Express PFS team (of which Atreya is a member) has no abstracts at the meeting reporting any more methane data, or indeed any trace gas data at all. That said Vittorio Formisano is part of the team reporting on Cassini's intriguing bright spot on Titan.

I'm looking forward to September 6th quite a lot right now.

For anyone needing a refresher, the summary from the end of last year's methane excitement on this blog is here, and the most recent take on the PFS work was here. (And if anyone knows why some of my archives seem to be in a strange blue format, I'd be grateful for the info). There's been a recent series of articles on astrobio.net, including this one on possible methane sources.

David's blog

As those who read the comments may have noticed my friend David Chandler, Mars Underground veteran and all round good egg, currently covering NASAish stuff and much more for New Scientist, is now also blogging under his own flag.

At the same time, it's worth noting that New Scientist now has a space site all of its own. In one story JPL is claiming that the loss of MTO will have no effect whatsoever on the data returned from MSL. My memory is that until recently some people were talking about MTO as so crucial to MSL's success that it might be worth launching it early just to make sure it was working and delaying MSL if it wasn't. My suspicion is that the "MSL not affected" line is tenable only with a minimalistic definition of what MSL is meant to do. It may be a bit like saying that nothing would have been lost from the MER mission if both rovers had blown up on sol 91, since their defined mission was just 90 sols long. True to the letter of the contract, perhaps, but not to the spirit of inquiry.

Cancelled telecoms orbiter

According to the Rocky Mountain News, NASA has cancelled the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter. This is a bad thing for Mars science. MTO was not intended as a science mission, but as support for a variety of science missions, starting off with the Mars Science Laboratory; if it had, as was intended, successfully opened up an era of interplanetary laser communication it would have sent back data at rates of a megabit a second and up, it would have allowed not just a great deal more science data, but also such wonderful virtual presence luxuries as near real time video. It was more or less the only mission in the pipeline that had a meaning beyond itself -- it was a mission intended to bind other missions into a program. It was a commitment, a piece of infrastructure saying we are here to stay, that we are making this second planet a part of our telecoms-linked world.

Without it, we have something which looks more like an open ended series of missions, all interesting in their own right, but not necessarily adding up to more than the sum of its parts. This is presumably not an accident. Mike Griffith has been put in charge of NASA in order to get Americans back to the moon, and a really aggressive robotic Mars programme is not a part of that goal. There is also clearly a move afoot to rebalance the planetary science budget, allowing more resources to the outer solar system.

And so MSL -- which I now expect to be delayed, but quite possibly not doubled up, as I was hoping a while back -- will have to use the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, due for launch in a few weeks time, as its relay for messages to earth. This means that MRO needs to last a decade or so. So here's hoping...

So the cancellation makes strategic sense, given what NASA is trying to do. But it's a real blow to the exploration of Mars, and to those of us partisan enough to think that the exploration of Mars should be up at the top of NASA's priorities, along with earth systems studies and an astrobiologically informed telescope programme, that's a bad thing.

Update 23/vii/05: The details and context, which I had previously missed, show that the rest of the cut from the Mars programme is an unspecified deferral of the Mars Sample Return mission. It is also claimed that money saved willkeep the MERs rolling (good) and also be used to keep the Mars Science Laboratory on track for 2009. We shall wait and see. And while we're waiting, we will note that cancelling MTO is also descoping MSL, since less data back means less scope for doing science, a point that Bruce has been making eloquently. It's also worth noting, in the context of that astrobiologically informed telescope programme I was mentioning, that Hubble money is coming out of the budget for developing the Terrestrial Planet Finder.

Correction 25/vii/05: this post previously said gigabyte when it meant megabit, which was pretty damned optimistic of it. Now it doesn't say that any more.

Anniversaries

Last Thursday, for reasons which will eventually become clear, I celebrated Bastille Day in the shade of a rather fine if lopsided cedar of lebanon in the gardens of Bowood House. But while most of my thoughts were centred on the eighteenth century, and how we -- and the cedar -- got from there to here, it was a good day to spare a through thoughts for Mars, as well, since it marked the 40th anniversary of the Mariner 4 fly by. We have come a remarkably long way in those four decades -- from a single fly by to a small flotilla of probes in orbit and from a handful of very grainy images of craters and the first local measurement of that damnably thin atmosphere to wonderful global databases full of stunning images and reams of reasonably compelling theorising. Not to mention robot explorers capable of rolling round the surface for years at a time. It's an extraordinary achievement. Here's a nice portfolio of recent imagery provided by Nature by way of celebration. I particularly like the sunset.

In other coincidences of the calendar, it is 30 years since the Apollo/Soyuz flights, over which Jim Oberg passes a somewhat caustic eye at The Space Review. And it is sixty years since the Trinity test, which the excellent Susan Kitchens has been blogging.

Sad news

Colin Pillinger has revealed that he has been diagnosed with primary-progressive MS, a very unusual blow to receive in your sixties. According to Pallab's report he's being characteristically determined in the face of this misfortune  which is probably all to the good. I'm sure all of us wish him well.

Enough carbon dioxide

I was just checking in on Mapping Mars and saw for the first time Amazon’s intriguing list of the “Statistically Improbable Phrases” (learn more) it contains:

astrogeology branch, earthly bacteria, layered terrains, valley networks, outflow channels, transit circle, northern lowlands, polar wander, layered deposits, geological units, television team, multiple working hypotheses, control net, space elevator, enough carbon dioxide, impact basins, ground ice

I guess I’d have expected quite a few of these improabilities, and I’m delighted by my company in some of them (Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds and Sir Arthur himself, natch, for “space elevator”) But I particularly like “enough carbon dioxide”, a seemingly anodyne phrase which I seem to use more than anyone else in the world (intriguingly, Al Reynolds uses this one, too -- but only a little). I have just checked the work in progress, and I find that, without any conscious intention, it too uses the phrase more than any other book around. And I’m sorely tempted to up the count...

I expect there are lots of people out there writing about “too much carbon dioxide”, and doubtless with good reason. But there’s only one person to turn to if you want a truly elegant sufficiency of fixed air.

Oliver Morton -- the only writer with enough “enough carbon dioxide”

Update 22/vii/05: This post, predictably enough, now tops the Google "enough carbon dioxide" list (which I'll admit was part of the point). A very small claim to fame -- not like topping the list for horcrux...

London bombs

In case you're wondering, I'm not in London at the moment, and as far as I know my friends and family are safe. It's clearly a broad attack, with six tube station incidents apparently confirmed -- Edgware Road, Kings Cross, Aldgate East, Russell Square, Moorgate and Liverpool Street -- and one bus bombed in Tavistock Square. It's possible there's more. Many casualties and certainly some fatalities -- two reported from Aldgate East, and many will have died on that bus -- but so far it doesn't look as terrible as Bali or Madrid, though these may be early days. The BBC is citing sources that say this is al Qaeda -- there's apparently a web statement, as well. Official sources are schtum on almost everything. Emergency procedures seem to be working, but there's a great deal of confusion. The whole tube network and teh central London buses are all shut down. Cell phone networks are congested, and apparently shut down in some areas to avoid the possibility of them being used as bomb triggers -- if the bomb that destroyed the top deck of the bus at Tavistock Square wasn't a suicide bomb, which I think it probably was, cell phone triggering might be quite likely.

Blair is leaving Gleneagles and coming down to London. G8 will continue in his absence. A good chance, if they want to take it, for the other leaders to come down and show solidarity.

Rather good quickly updated news available at the Cambridge Evening News, though other people seem to have discovered this and their server is slowing down a bit.

Quick updates also at the BBC and the Guardian.

I'm not planning running blogging on this.

UPDATE
At least four bombs, according to the home secretary. The bus, and the tube between Rusell Square and Kings Cross, the tube at Edgware Road, and the tube between Aldgate East and Moorgate. Some trains stuck between tunnels.

The shot seen across the solar system

Congratulations to the Deep Impact team, especially to Jay Melosh, Peter Schultz and Alan Delamere, not because I know they did any more than anyone else, just because they're the ones I know best. This was by all accounts not an easy mission, with hardware problems, budget problems, a greatly shortened cruise phase and all in all a lot of headaches. And yet they pulled it off.

There's a pretty gallery of pictures at space.com. David Chandler points out that the brighter-than-expected plume may make it impossible to get images of the crater, but that its dimensions may still be inferred from other data. It's also worth noting that the surface images from before the blast are fascinating, and may yield up a lot of insights on their own. And there's a chance of sending the mothership off to another comet, too (though there are no more bullets to shoot).

In the Guardian, the excellent Tim Radford puts things in context for op-ed page readers who may avoid the science pages. I particularly like his phrase that "Life is a kind of murder mystery in reverse: life emerged, and then proceeded to trample around and erase the evidence of its own origins." But I would pick a couple of nits. One is that, though it's true that an imminent impact by something like Tempel 1 would be beyond our capacity for defelection, far lesser objects that are far more likely threats would be more amenable to a change in trajectory. Another is that, by my count, this is the fourth American comet exploration mission (predecessors in order of launch: ISEE-3/ICE, Deep Space 1 and Stardust) not the fourth all in all. Admittedly, the Soviet Vega 1 and Vega 2 missions to Halley didn't contribute a great deal, and nor did the Japanese missions Sakigake and Suisei (and nor did ISEE-3/ICE, for that matter), but ESA's Giotto did. (You might argue that Stardust shouldn't yet be on the list because the samples aren't safe and sound on the ground, and we definitely shouldn't count our chickens, but it has visited a comet and sent back pictures, which should count for something.) Other missions have revealed a lot about comets from a distance: Galileo took some wonderful images of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, and SOHO has discovered almost 1,000 of the things.

And in general I think the "where we come from" origin-of-life stuff can be rather overblown. It is true that much of the water and many reduced carbon compounds (which means almost all carbon bearing stuff that's not carbon dioxide ) present on the early earth may well have been delivered by comets; many of the carbon atoms in our bodies, and to some extent the water in the rain, were once components of comets, and before that components of distant stars. The sublime aura of such a thought leads scientists and those of us who write about them to trot it out a lot -- it moves the scientists, and they know it can move many of us.

But we already know that these materials were probably provided by comets, and it's not clear to me how much more about the supply of comets back then and the importance of the volatiles they delivered we'll learn from looking at this particular one now. (Education on these matters welcome). It seems to me that the difficult origin problem is how materials such as this (or others) get caught up in the self-perpetuating processes we understand as life -- the problem of how geochemical reactions became biochemical reactions -- and that's not a problem that this research addresses. If I wanted to be dismissive, I'd say that to tie the study of contemporary comets to the origin of life is a bit like a geologist who finds a particularly fine outcrop of slate on a hillside in Wales saying that he's offering basic insight into the origin of my roof; he's found similar components, but not the process, and the process is what explains the roof. (Not a great analogy, and possibly misleading in that it evokes thoughts of roof design, but serviceable).

I worry about such things (not, I should add, a great deal) because it seems to me that you don't need to oversell things that much. Comets definitely tell us a great deal about the conditions that held sway at the time the solar system formed, and for most of us that should be wonder enough. And if that isn't wonder enough, the ways in which we investigate such things are wonders in and of themselves. Tim argues that we should feel humility in the face of such things, and I think that's salutory. But let's take some pride, too.