The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

by Richard Russell Lawrence

  Reports by NASA advisory and review committees raising warnings about the shuttle fleet’s age and continued safety were cited by many members. O’Keefe stated that the concerns raised were all in reference to future safety, but there had been no indications that the current safety of the shuttle program was compromised. Another issue raised repeatedly was the budget cuts made over the past decade to planned shuttle upgrades. O’Keefe explained that, in his understanding of the shuttle’s budget history, quality assurance procedures and other program management approaches had yielded efficiencies and cost reductions, while at the same time, indicators showed safety improvements and a decrease in safety incidents both before and on orbit.

  Addressing questions about the justification of manned space exploration versus robotic, O’Keefe said it was “not an issue of either/or” NASA’s approach, as it was doing with the Mars mission – to use robotic capabilities to understand the risks of human involvement and learn what would be necessary to support an eventual human mission “if it is deemed appropriate.” He mentioned the Hubble Space Telescope as an example of how unmanned exploration capabilities and human involvement worked in a complementary way to achieve outstanding science.

  “This is not the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning,” Boehlert said in conclusion. He praised the openness and cooperation of O’Keefe and Admiral Gehman, and “the total commitment I find on the part of every person involved . . . to get the facts and let us be guided by the facts.”

  Chapter 5

  New Horizons – The Ongoing Quest

  Life on Mars

  When in 2003 the orbits of Mars and Earth brought them the closest together they had been for 60,000 years, both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) sent robotic missions to Mars. The ESA mission was named Mars Express; the NASA mission was named Mars Exploration Rover (MER). NASA already had a satellite, Mars Odyssey, in orbit around Mars. The missions were intended to find evidence of life on Mars, either in the past or the present.

  Mars Express was an international collaboration, originally consisting of two orbiters and a lander. The orbiters were ESA’s Mars Express itself and the Japanese spacecraft Nozomi; Beagle 2 was the lander.

  Mars Express was launched by a Russian four-stage Soyuz/Fregat launcher, with the Fregat upper stage separating from the spacecraft after placing it on a Mars-bound trajectory. Mars Express was mounted on the Fregat upper stage.

  The spacecraft used its on-board means of propulsion solely for orbit corrections and to slow the spacecraft down for Mars orbit insertion. Electrical power was provided by the spacecraft’s solar panels which were deployed shortly after launch. When Mars was at its maximum distance from the sun (aphelion), the solar panels would still be capable of delivering 650 watts which was more than enough to meet the mission’s maximum requirement of 500 watts, equivalent to just five ordinary 100 watt light bulbs!

  When the spacecraft’s view of the sun was obscured by Mars during a solar eclipse, a lithium-ion battery (67.5 amp hours), previously charged up by the solar panels, took over the power supply.

  Five of the instruments on Mars Express (HRSC, OMEGA, PFS, ASPERA and SPICAM) were descendants of instruments originally built for the Russian Mars ’96 mission. Each of the seven orbiter instrument teams on Mars Express had Russian coinvestigators who contributed their intellectual expertise to the project.

  The Japanese spacecraft Nozomi was intended to go into near equatorial orbit around Mars shortly after Mars Express entered polar orbit. Nozomi had been due to reach the Red Planet in October 1999, but was delayed by a problem with the propulsion system, so the two missions took the opportunity to collaborate.

  They shared a common interest in the Martian atmosphere – Nozomi even carried a close relative of ASPERA, the instrument on Mars Express to study interactions between the upper atmosphere and the solar wind.

  Measurements recorded simultaneously by both spacecraft from their different vantage points would provide an unprecedented opportunity to study such interactions, so the two missions agreed to a programme of joint investigations and to the exchange of coinvestigators between the instrument teams.

  ESA’s Beagle 2 landed on Mars at about thesametime as NASA’s Mars Rover mission. The two space agencies made arrangements to use each other’s orbiters as back-up for relaying data and other communications from the landers to Earth.

  Mars Express also intended to use NASA’s Deep Space Network for communications with Earth during parts of the mission. US scientists played a major role in one of Mars Express’s payload instruments, MARSIS, and participated as co-investigators in most other instruments.

  Mars Express and Beagle 2 marked the beginning of a major European involvement in an international programme to explore Mars over the next two decades. Europe, the US and Japan are planning to send missions, but many more countries will be contributing experiments, hardware and expertise.

  The Beagle 2 lander was built by a British team. Being small and light it did not have a propulsion system of its own, and had to be “carried” precisely to its destination. On 19 December 2003 Mars Express was on a collision course with Mars, at which point Beagle 2 separated from it. Mars Express then veered away to avoid crashing onto the planet by firing its thrusters to get away from the collision course and enter into orbit around Mars. This was the first time that an orbiter delivered a lander without its own propulsion onto a planet, and attempted orbit insertion immediately afterwards.

  Unfortunately no signal from Beagle 2 was ever received although Mars Express sent back significant pictures and information from orbit. It is thought that the atmospheric conditions at the time Beagle 2 attempted to land resulted in it being destroyed upon impact.

  On 24 January 2004 Dr John Murray of the Mars Express team stated:

  Scientists are on the threshold of the most exciting discovery about humanity’s place in the Universe since Galileo and Copernicus proved that the Earth goes round the Sun.

  The European Mars Express spacecraft has determined beyond reasonable doubt that water, the prerequisite for all forms of terrestrial life, still exists on the Red Planet, and that it once flowed in torrents across its surface.

  These remarkable revelations about our celestial neighbour provide the most tantalising evidence yet that the miracle of life on earth may not be unique, even within the confines of the solar system.

  Wherever water is found on the Blue Planet – from the tundra of Antarctica to the depths of the ocean floor – we know there is life. For life as we know it, we need water. Now we can be certain that this vital commodity is present, and may once have been abundant, on the surface of Mars.

  It seems more probable than ever that the planet so long considered barren and inert, may once have supported life.

  It would be no exageration to compare such a discovery to the Copernican revolution, which put paid to the notion that the Earth stood at the centre of the Universe, or the voyages of Columbus and Magellan, proving the world to be round. It would mean that life has arisen twice on planets separated by as little as 35 million miles. And if that is so, it is probably common throughout the Universe.

  We are not quite there yet. Neither Mars Express, nor NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers, are designed to test the soil and rock for the chemical evidence that would provide definitive proof. Indeed, the European Probe’s results make it more frustrating than ever that Beagle 2, the British lander that was sent to Mars specifically to search for life, remains incommunicado.

  The evidence of water, in the form of ice, makes it yet more important that we refuse to give up and dispatch Beagles 3, 4 and 5 to the Red Planet to resume the search.

  We should not hold our breath for intelligent Martian life. Anything we find there will be extremely primitive, hardy microorganisms that can cope with extreme cold and harmful ultraviolet rays. These can live under the most unlikely of conditions: the Apollo moon landings turned up microorganisms carried years before
as passengers on an unmanned probe.

  Martian life could be found in the form of fossils that died out long ago. Or it could survive in certain suitable zones. The search will be a little like opening a window on the Earth billions of years ago.

  There are times when science is more like hearing a Beethoven quartet than poring over reams of numbers. Yesterday was one of those occasions.

  To look at the pictures from Mars Express’s high-resolution stereo camera was to see something so supremely beautiful that I had to remind myself it was science, not art. These images would not have looked out of place at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.

  Yet they tell us so much. There can be little doubt that the vast channel of Reull Vallis was carved by flowing water. It has water deposition and erosion: there is no way it could be anything else. When we look at Valles Marineris, it is as if we are gazing on the canyons and mesas that are so familiar to us from the American South West. It is a landscape of desolation and grandeur, but one that might possibly have harboured life.

  This voyage of discovery encompasses so many great aspects of human endeavour. Important scientific advances are being made. But it is also advancing the achievement of the human race.

  On 27 January 2004 Professor Colin Pillinger, the chief scientist of Beagle 2, was interviewed in The Times. When the loss of Beagle 2 was described as a heroic failure, he said:

  “I don’t want to be a heroic failure. We would still like to be a heroic success, and we’ve done enough – if we don’t find it this time – to merit a second chance.”

  Mars Express had found direct evidence of water on Mars. When he was asked about it he said:

  “None of us thought there wasn’t water on Mars. I’ve seen it in my own Martian meteorites. But this is not a discovery of water. It was a very elegant demonstration of it.”

  Professor Pillinger became interested in space years before Sputnik went into orbit in 1957, his mind catapulted starwards by the BBC radio programme Journey into Space.

  Professor Pillinger compared the ESA and NASA missions:

  Sending up two probes at once doubled NASA’s chances of hitting Mars at the closest it will come to Earth for 60,000 years, but Spirit was a better bet than Beagle even if it had been flying solo. While it had 24 air cushions and retro rockets to break its fall, Beagle had just the two airbags. Pillinger points out that Mars Express, the European spacecraft on which Beagle hitched a ride, could not have carried cargo anything as heavy as that so blame the lightweight European space programme.

  But if only the dream had come true! The great future that lies beyond Beagle is more glorious than anything the American Rovers can aspire to. While NASA is merely looking for water, a precondition for life, Pillinger sought life itself.

  He explained to me how the origins of his quest lay in the 1976Viking mission to the planet, which concluded that there was no life there. NASA turned its back on Mars and scooted off to explore the rest of the universe. But Viking later provided chemists with evidence that some meteorites that had been found in the Antarctic were Martian. It was while Pillinger and other scientists were examining their gas content to see if it matched the Martian atmosphere that they found, to their immense surprise, that there were traces of carbonates in them – evidence of life. Controversial at first, this finding was gradually accepted, the only remaining doubt being the worry that the samples could have been contaminated. It was to banish this doubt that Beagle was sent to conduct the same geochemical experiments on Mars to find the chemical fossils of extraterrestrials.

  Had things gone differently, by the middle of next month Pillinger might well have been able to announce that he had found the first proof of extraterrestal life.

  NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter went into orbit around Mars during 2001, then in 2003 NASA launched another Mars exploration project called MER (Mars Exploration Rover). On 10 June and 7 July 2003 they launched spacecraft toward Mars, each spacecraft carrying a Mars Exploration Rover. Like the ESA Mars Express mission, the rovers were in search of answers about the history of water on Mars and were scheduled to land on 3 January and 24 January PST (4 January and 25 January UTC).

  The first rover landed on 4 January 2004. Called Spirit by NASA, it was a six-wheeled vehicle about the size of a golf cart and was equipped to play the role of a geological explorer.

  Spirit immediately transmitted a range of black and white images, including a sweeping panoramic of the Martian landscape, as well as a bird’s-eye view of the rover with its solar panels fully deployed.

  Mission science manager John Callas said:

  “This just keeps getting better and better. The pictures are fantastic.”

  The total cost of the MER project was £545 million.

  When NASA’s first Mars Exploration rover landed on Mars, Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent of The Times reported:

  NASA scientists controlling the Spirit rover, which landed on Mars on Sunday, have chosen its first destination: a 10-metre-wide (30ft) crater they have nicknamed “Sleepy Hollow”.

  The circular depression, which can be seen clearly in panoramic pictures sent to Earth yesterday, has been singled out as the best place for Spirit to begin its search for evidence that Mars was once wet and habitable. The rover is likely to set off for the crater, named after an American horror story, as soon as it leaves its landing module early next week.

  Steve Squyres, the mission’s chief scientist, said the images suggested that a meteor strike had probably created the crater. The impact is likely to have cut through layers of rock, excavating the planetary surface for the rover to explore.

  “The science so far has been extremely focused on where to go after the egress,” Dr Squyres said. “It’s a circular depression, 30ft in diameter and about 40ft to 50ft away from the rover.

  “It’s a hole in the ground, a window into the interior of Mars. It may have been an impact crater, largely filled with dust. You can see the rock is exposed on the far side.

  “It’s a very exciting feature for us. It’s probably where we will go unless we see something better.

  “The feature now has a name. We have all not been getting as much sleep as we’d like, so this feature is now named Sleepy Hollow.”

  Spirit, which has a daily range of 20m (65ft), will use its rock abrasion tool to grind down the surface of boulders, before testing them with scientific instruments. It aims to establish whether Mars holds sedimentary rocks, which would offer evidence that the planet once flowed with water – a prerequisite for life.

  Scientists believe that Gusev Crater, the region in which Spirit landed, might have held an ancient lake, making it a promising site for finding sediments.

  Dr Squyres said yesterday that tests on four of the craft’s six key instruments had shown that they had survived Spirit’s hard landing on Mars, in which it bounced up to 14 times before coming to a halt.

  His team was relieved that the sensitive Mossbauer spectrometer, which identifies iron isotopes in rocks, was working. Tests on the remaining instruments will begin today. Scientists were hoping last night to receive a colour high-resolution panoramic picture from the rover, which would be by far the best image of Mars ever captured.

  Dr Squyres said that they had received 12 thumbnail pictures showing that Spirit had taken the required photographs, which were being stored in the craft’s memory, awaiting the right opportunity to return them to Earth.

  “We have acquired the image, the pictures are taken and on board Spirit, ready to be downlinked,” he said.

  Earlier, the team successfully deployed the rover’s high-gain antenna and pointed it to Earth, which will allow it to talk directly with mission control.

  This will cut communication times to nine minutes, compared with more than an hour when signals are relayed through NASA’s twin orbiters, Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor.

  Matt Wallace, deputy surface mission manager, said Spirit had taken pictures of the Sun’s position overhead t
o point the antenna in the correct direction.

  “Just as the ancient mariners used sextants to locate themselves by shooting the Sun, we were successful at shooting the Sun using our pan-cam,” he said. “It’s been another good day on Mars.”

  On 16 January 2004, Mark Henderson reported:

  NASA’s Spirit rover took its first spin on Mars yesterday, successfully driving the three metres from its landing platform to the planet’s surface. Engineers played “Who Let the Dogs Out?” on the mission control stereo as pictures showing two parallel tracks in the Martian dirt were beamed back to Earth, confirming that the golf-cart-sized robot had completed the most hazardous manoeuvre of its three-month mission.

  The 78-second journey to the surface ended a 12-day wait since Spirit’s landing at Gusev Crater on January 4, during which the rover had been unfolding itself, checking its systems and turning 115 degrees to line up with the most favourable exit ramp. It is now parked next to the lander, where it will stay for three days while scientists conduct experiments on nearby soil and rocks.

  At the weekend, Spirit will set off on its first long drive, probably towards a crater approximately 250 metres away. If all goes well, the plan is then to turn right at the crater and head for the hills about 3km (1.9 miles) away.

  The success, which scientists toasted with champagne, came the day after President Bush announced NASA budget increases of $1 billion (£549 million) a year to support efforts to establish a permanent Moon base and send a manned mission to Mars.

  Charles Elachi, director of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, which built and operates Spirit said: “Less than 24 hours ago, President Bush committed our nation to a sustained mission of space exploration. We at NASA move awfully fast. We have six wheels in the dirt. Mars is our sandbox and we’re ready to play and work.”

  Though the first drive took just 78 seconds, at a speed of 4cm per second, Spirit then had to turn its main antenna towards Earth before it could confirm its new position and send back pictures. Scientists at mission control cheered as the good news arrived at 9.50 am GMT.