Russia could send a man to Mars at a tenth of the cost of American plans, according to one of Russia’s top space officials, Leonid Gorshkov, the chief designer of the state-controlled Energia company, which built the core of the International Space Station and now wants to re-enter the space race. “Technically, the first flight to Mars could be made in 2014,” Dr Gorshkov said.
Today Spirit’s science team will join European colleagues in an unprecedented experiment when Europe’s Mars Express orbiter flies directly overhead. Spirit will look up into the Martian atmosphere with its panoramic cameras and a thermal emissions spectrometer while Mars Express looks at the same portion from above with its instruments. Data from the spacecraft will be combined to create the most comprehensive picture yet of the atmosphere on Mars.
Spirit’s sister rover, Opportunity, is scheduled to land next Sunday at the Meridiani Planum region of Mars.
On 25 January 2004, a second NASA robotic probe landed on Mars and began to send back pictures. The next day Mark Henderson reported in The Times:
A dark and mysterious side to Mars that has never been seen before was revealed by NASA’s Opportunity rover yesterday in a remarkable series of pictures beamed to Earth within hours of its faultless landing.
The images of Meridiani Planum, where NASA’s second robotic probe touched down at 5.05 am, show a strange plain covered in fine-grain maroon soil much darker than anything yet observed on Mars, and an outcrop of grey bedrock that could offer clues to the planet’s geological past.
These odd features are ideal for the rover’s mission – the search for evidence that the planet was once wet and suitable for life – and led one scientist to describe the landing site as “the promised land”.
The slabs of protruding rock could contain grey haematite, a form of iron oxide that is normally formed in the presence of water. They are the rover’s most likely first target. Meridiani Planum was chosen for Opportunity’s landing as orbiting spacecraft had picked up traces of the mineral in the region. Steve Squyres, the rover missions’ chief scientist, said that he was flabbergasted by the pictures, which look different from those taken by Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, at Gusev Crater.
“Opportunity has touched down in a bizarre, alien landscape,” he said. “I’m astonished. I’m blown away. It looks like nothing that I’ve ever seen in my life. Holy smokes, I’ve got nothing else to say.”
The rover’s textbook landing brightened the mood at NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the team has been working furiously since Wednesday to diagnose and correct a potentially catastrophic fault aboard Spirit, which landed three weeks ago.
Engineers said that they had established the root cause of its problems and had stabilised the robot by switching off a malfuctioning memory system.
Even so, it may be three weeks or more before Spirit can resume scientific investigations, and the memory problem may prevent it from recovering full operational capacity.
Mission control had said that it could take 22 hours for Opportunity to make contact with Earth following its scheduled arrival at 5.05 am, but the rover sent signals within moments of landing. Scientists cheered, and were congratulated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, and former Vice President Al Gore, who joined the vigil at the laboratory.
Sean O’Keefe, the NASA administrator, saluted his team for landing both rovers successfully, and for beating the “Mars jinx under which two thirds of all missions to the planet have failed. What a night,” he said as he broke open champagne for a second time in three weeks. “No one dared hope that both rover landings would be so successful.”
While Spirit landed on the base petal of its protective pyramidal shell, Opportunity landed on a side petal and had to be flipped into an upright position.
All the airbags that cushioned it on landing appear to have been successfully retracted. One of Spirit’s airbags refused to deflate properly forcing engineers to turn the rover 120 degrees before it could be driven away from the landing module.
British scientists will today begin one of their final attempts to find their missing Beagle 2 lander. The team has not tried to contact the probe for almost two weeks to try to force it into an emergency transmission mode.
On 27 January 2004, Mark Henderson reported in The Times:
NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has landed in a small crater, to the delight of scientists who hope that it will provide a ready made window into the planet’s geological past.
The shallow crater, about 65ft across, was formed by a meteor impact, which has performed natural excavation work allowing the rover to peer below the Martian surface without having to dig.
Steve Squyres of Cornell University, lead scientist for the Mars rovers, said that the crater was ideal: big enough to be of great scientific interest but not so deep that the six wheeled robot would be stranded. “We have scored a 300 million mile interplanetary hole in one,” he said. The rover will spend at least a week unfolding itself before leaving its landing module.
British scientists have begun a post-mortem examination into the failure of Beagle 2. Colin Pillinger, the mission’s chief scientist, said yesterday that his team accepted the probable loss.
Direct evidence that Mars was once awash with liquid water has been discovered for the first time, proving that life could once have existed on the planet and may still be there.
NASA scientists announced last night that the Opportunity rover had determined that the rocks of its Meridiani Planum landing site had been soaked in liquid water, the prerequisite of life on Earth.
The startling findings show unequivocally that at least part of the Red Planet has been wet and habitable in the past, with conditions suitable for living organisms to evolve and survive.
Steve Squyres, chief scientist for NASA’s rover mission, said that while the discovery does not prove that life had ever existed on Mars, it shows beyond doubt that it is a real possibility.
“The purpose of going to Mars was to see whether or not it was a habitable environment,” he said. “We believe that this place, in Meridiani Planum, at some point in time was habitable. That doesn’t mean life was there, but it is a place that was habitable at one time.”
James Garvin, NASA’s lead scientist for Mars exploration, said, “NASA launched the Mars Exploration Rover mission specifically to check whether at least one part of Mars ever had a persistently wet environment that could possibly have been hospitable to life. Today we have strong evidence for an exciting answer – ‘yes’.”
Observations from orbit, most recently from the European Mars Express spacecraft, have shown that frozen water exists at the Red Planet’s poles. Probes have also photographed geological features such as canyons and dried-up beds that appear to have been carved by rivers, oceans and lakes.
Water, however, must exist in its liquid form to sustain life, and no direct evidence of this had been found before Opportunity’s investigations.
The conclusion that the rocks of Meridiani Planum, where Opportunity landed on January 25, were once underwater follows three weeks of meticulous experiments. “We’ve been attacking it with every piece of our hardware and the puzzle pieces have been falling into place,” Dr Squyres said.
Four separate pieces of evidence have combined to build a compelling picture. The alpha particle X-ray spectrometer has found high concentrations of sulphate salts, which have to be dissolved in water to accumulate. The Mossbauer spectrometer has also found a mineral called jarosite, which is formed in the presence of water.
Physical features of the rock have provided important clues. Round particles known as “spherules”, which Dr Squyres likened to “blueberries in a muffin”, appear to have been formed by dissolved minerals. Holes known as “vugs” have been left by crystals of salt, laid down in briny water.
Some of the key discoveries came from analysis of a rock nicknamed El Capitan, after a rock formation in Yosemite National Park in California.
Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, said, “Opportunity has landed in an area of Mars where liquid water once drenched the surface. This area would have been a good, habitable environment.”
Scientists will have to wait, however, to find out whether this environment actually supported life. Neither Opportunity nor her sister rover, Spirit, carries the instruments needed to search for traces of living organisms. Britain’s Beagle 2 Mars probe, which was lost last year, did carry two experiments that would have been able to detect life.
The old theory about Canals on Mars was based on an optical illusion. Mark Henderson reported:
The question of whether water and life ever existed on Mars dates from the 17th century, when the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens first identified light patches at the poles that appeared to be ice caps.
The notion, however, did not capture the public imagination until the 1890s, with the publication of three books by the American Percival Lowell.
Inspired by the work of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who in 1877 had seen a criss-cross network of straight channels, or canali, on the Martian surface, Lowell built an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, from which to examine the planet more closely.
Having mistranslated canali as “canals”, Lowell concluded that the lines were evidence of a vast irrigation system built by an intelligent civilization. By 1910, his theory was complete: Mars was drying out and dying through lack of water, accounting for its red hue and necessitating the irrigations.
The hypothesis eventually foundered on the discovery that Schiaparelli’s canali did not exist: they were optical illusions produced by the telescopes of the period. But the idea that Mars could be wet and inhabited stuck, inspiring hundreds of science fiction novels and films.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a series of Martian flypasts by NASA’s Mariner Spacecraft dispelled any possibility that Mars was at all Earth-like, showing that carbon dioxide, rather than water and oxygen, was the main component of its atmosphere and ice caps. The Viking landings of 1976went further, finding no conclusive evidence of either water or life, although some investigators still contend that the results of one of the spacecraft’s experiments turned up positive for the existence of micro-organisms.
The result was a 20-year hiatus in Mars exploration as space scientists, largely convinced that the planet was barren, turned their attention and dollars elsewhere.
All that changed, however, on August 6, 1996, with the discovery of the Martian meteorite ALH84001, which contained mineral deposits that some scientists interpreted as fossilised microbes.
Interest in Mars was revived overnight.
Martian space race
On 5 February 2004 The Times Science Correspondent reported:
Europe intends to go head-to-head with the United States in a race to bring a piece of Mars back to Earth in the next chapter of the search for life on the Red Planet.
A European mission to scoop up half a kilogram of Martian rocks and carry them home for analysis will blast off in 2011, European Space Agency (ESA) officials announced yesterday.
The project, which will involve British companies and scientists, is the most ambitious element of the ESA’s Aurora programme, a “road map” for exploring Mars that aims to land European astronauts on the planet by 2033. It will also put the agency in direct competition with NASA, which is planning its own sample return mission at the same time.
The Aurora programme is offering the first serious challenge to the US lead in civilian space flight since the Soviet successes of the 1950s and 1960s. While the two space agencies prefer to be seen as partners rather than adversaries, their increasing emphasis on Mars exploration – as shown by President Bush’s recent pledge of a manned mission to the planet – is inevitably lending an edge of rivalry to their efforts.
As the orbits of Earth and Mars make missions practical only every two years or so, each forthcoming “window” will see a flotilla of similar European and American craft being launched for the Red Planet. Last year the ESA’s Mars Express and Beagle 2 probes blasted off just a couple of weeks before NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers and such races will soon become commonplace.
In 2007 NASA is sending a lander named Phoenix and the ESA is considering a plan to refly Beagle 2, possibly as a pack of four or five landers to ensure maximum chances of success.
Two years afterwards, both agencies want to send large rover missions to the planet – NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory and the ESA’s ExoMars which would seek signs of life and test for hazards to future human pioneers.
The agencies are following identical timetables for sample return: in 2011, a “return vehicle” would be launched and parked in orbit around Mars waiting for a second mission in 2014. This would land on the planet, then blast off into orbit to dock with the waiting orbiter and return home.
Both agencies see manned missions to the Moon as essential precursors to sending astronauts to Mars: the ESA envisages a human Moon mission in about 2024 while NASA wants to establish a permanent lunar base at the same time. The earliest likely date for a manned mission to Mars is 2030. The European “road map” was presented by Franco Ongaro, the Aurora mission’s project manager at a London conference held to consider Britain’s contribution.
The Government is likely to support the project, even though it does not yet back manned spaceflight. Aurora is structured to allow countries to opt in for five years at a time, so Britain would be able to drop out when the manned phase begins. The initial five year budget has been set at €900 million (£615 million) and British scientists want the Government to contribute £30 million a year. It spends about £180 million annually on civilian space exploration.
Dr Ongaro played down the notion that the ESA and NASA were embarking on a fresh space race, but insisted that Europe was just as well placed as the US to lead worthwhile missions to Mars.
He said that the Aurora budget was comparable to NASA’s expenditure on long-term Mars exploration and that both would have to overcome similar technical challenges. “Neither us nor the Americans know at the moment how a mission to the Moon or to Mars can be done,” he said. “For the next five years both NASA and ourselves are going to be working on exactly the same thing: how to do it. We intend to have a programme of the same type and scale as theirs.”
He said that unmanned probes, sample return and manned Moon landings would be essential before a manned mission. “We need to evolve these before taking the risk with humans. We need to learn to walk before we can run.”
Professor Colin Pillinger, Beagle 2’s chief scientist, said Britain should sign up to the first stage of Aurora, which offers focus on unmanned exploration of Mars. “The initial stages have my wholehearted support. Let’s wait and see about the later stages, when we ask humans to do the fieldwork rather than robots.”
The 2009 ExoMars rover and the 2011–14 Mar’s Sample Return (MSR) missions are Aurora’s “flagship” projects, which will be confirmed as soon as funding is made available by member states. EADS Astrium, the British satellite company that built Beagle 2, has won contracts to develop the concepts for both missions.
ExoMars is likely to be a six-wheel rover similar to Spirit and Opportunity but with a longer range and instruments that can look for past and present life. NASA’s rovers are designed only to search for mineral evidence of water. An attached orbiter would test a docking system for sample return effectively throwing out a capsule and capturing it again, to prove it can be done far from Earth.
MSR would be much more ambitious, aiming to bring 500 grams of Mars rocks back to Earth for analysis. This would allow much more complex experiments to be performed than would be possible with a robotic probe alone. Professor Pillinger said such a sample would contain about a billion grains of 50 microns.
Professor Pilling
er added:
“As modern geo-scientists can treat a grain this size as a rock, it could keep all the geoscientists in Europe happy for some time.”
Smart 1: the Star Trek propulsion system
On 18 August 2003, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that “Europe was to send a spacecraft to the moon”.
The unmanned craft would be powered by a revolutionary engine which has been called the Star Trek propulsion system. ESA’s Smart 1 spacecraft forms part of its “Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology” (SMART) project, the purpose of which is to test new technologies that will eventually be used on bigger projects.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Smart 1 spacecraft was launched on 4 September 2003 from French Guiana. It carried a British-built sensor to analyse the lunar surface and scientists hope it will answer questions about how the moon was created. The mission could also confirm the suspected existence of water beneath the lunar surface.
The key to the mission is a new development known as an ion engine. This “Star Trek propulsion system” is much smaller than other spacecraft engines and uses solar panels to charge electrically heavy gas atoms, which propel the craft forward as they are pushed away at high speed.
The ion engine begins very slowly, its thrust barely as strong as the force a postcard would produce as it falls through the air. But over long periods of time it can generate much more power and produce high speeds.
Scientists hope it could one day allow manned missions to faraway stars. Guiseppe Racca, the Smart 1 project manager at ESA, said:
“This engine opens up a whole new era of exploration.”
The one-square-metre craft will take 18 months to reach the moon and will then swoop to within 300km of the lunar surface, using its array of sensors and cameras to analyse the lunar surface.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 48