Possible Pluto Probe -- AGAIN!?

Original PKE. NASA

SpaceDaily.com; May 7, 2001; Space Science: "The Perils of Pauline" 

The saga of the Pluto probe once again graces the NewsNotes.  And again, nothing is firm about this mission: as one arm of government say it's too costly, another attempts to fund it, and the scientific community circulates reinstatement petitions.  So here's the recap and the latest:   

• The JPL managed Pluto-Kuiper Express (PKE) mission was to be the first craft to visit Pluto, its moon Charon, and examine Kuiper Belt asteroids at the edge of our Solar System.  Mission timing was critical because Pluto's highly-eccentric orbit was taking it away from the Sun.  This will eventually cause the planet's tenuous atmosphere to freeze over by 2020, and stay that way for the next 120-years.  To take advantage of a fuel-savings (and thus mass-saving and cost-saving) boost from Jupiter, the probe had to be launched by December 2004.  

• Because of cost overruns with another deep-space mission, the Europa Orbiter mission to Jupiter's moon, the Pluto mission was cancelled last summer. 

• After much protest from the scientific community, NASA in December issued an open design competition that would let any interested science teams submit a Pluto mission plan.  The proposals had to keep mission costs below a half-a-billion dollars.  One or two finalists were to receive money for continued study.

• The incoming Bush Administration, in an attempt to cap cost overruns in the Space Station and increase funding for Mars missions, axed the Pluto mission earlier this year.

• Congress had other plans and ordered NASA to continue reviewing mission proposals.  Both houses of congress put forth science budgets that could keep the program alive.  The House Science committee said it may hold hearings on the probe.

• NASA received five proposals, by the April deadline.  The winning proposals, if any, will be chosen on June 1 -- but only if Congress gives NASA the go-ahead.

According to SpaceDaily, most of the proposals are reworking of existing spacecraft design and don't require development of any new and expensive technology.  This should keep costs low.  SpaceDaily has learned the organizations behind the five proposals:

• JPL and Lockheed Martin teamed to create a mission based on the current "Stardust" comet sample-return mission.

• Another team is formed of Southwest Research Institute and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.  Johns Hopkins was responsible for the "NEAR" mission to the asteroid Eros, that ended with a spectacular landing recently.

• JPL and TRW joined to make a bid. 

• Malin Space Science Systems, which is responsible for the current Mars Orbiter, submitted a proposal.

• Lastly, Russia's IKI space science agency put in a surprise bid.

Pluto/Charon -- unexplored.

These probes would all include a minimum science package: a camera for close-up imaging, a near-IR spectrometer to analyze icy compositions, and a UV spectrometer to study atmospheric gasses.  If mass and budget allowed, the probe would include a mass spectrometer, to gather more atmospheric information, and sensors to detect any magnetic field around Pluto. 

The Planetary Society is leading another letter-writing campaign to urge Congress to save the Pluto-Kuiper probe.  With all the setbacks faced by Pluto-Kuiper, the Society might have to wait until the Underworld (ruled by Pluto) freezes over before the probe is given the go-ahead.  We have not heard the last of this "space opera" -- say tuned.

It's a Planet! 

National Radio Astronomy Observatory; May 10, 2001; Press Release: "New Radio Telescope Makes First Scientific Observations"

Maxwell Mount on Venus.  NRAO, NAIC, NSF

That's not a sonogram of a baby in the picture on the left -- that's a planet! The image was created from Earth-based radar studies of the planet Venus and shows details as small as 1.2-km. Imaging was done using the two largest radio telescopes in the world.

The 305-meter Arecibo telescope's upgraded radar transmitter was used to beam signals to the planet. Both it and the newly completed 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope -- the largest fully-steerable radar telescope in the world -- received the return signal after a 5-minute round-trip time. The return signals were then used to construct the image.

Radio waves are the only way to examine wide-area surface morphology of the cloud-enshrouded planet. Large areas of Venus were last studied by radar with NASA's Venus-orbiting Magellan spacecraft. The recent images will be compared with the decade-old Magellan orbiter images to check for geologic activity on Venus: processes like landslides and volcanic activity may be active on the planet. In fact, the data gathered from the ground-based telescopes can measure the altitude of some Venusian geologic surfaces to a better accuracy than Magellan was capable of achieving.

Additionally, the pair of telescopes examined the newly discovered asteroid 2001 EC16. The imaging was done on March 26 -- not long after the asteroid was discovered on March 15. As it passed by Earth, at only 8-times the distance to the Moon, 15-meters resolution images were obtained. EC16 was found to be a 150-meter long object that rotated once every 200-hours -- a very slow rate for any space body.

They're Alive!

Discovery.com; May 10, 2001; DiscoveryNews: "Scientists Claim to Revive Alien Bacteria"

Over a century ago, the chemist Svante Aarhenius proposed the incredible "panspermia" theory: the vast diversity of life on Earth evolved from primitive forms that were deposited here from outer space -- 4 billion years ago. Carl Sagan, an exobiologist, popularized a saying that would be an apt retort to this theory: "Incredible claims require incredible proofs." Now the incredible proof has arrived -- maybe. Geologist Bruno D'Argenio, of the Italian National Research Council, and his college Giuseppe Geraci, a molecular biologist at Naples University, claim they have resurrected the primitive alien life that seeded our planet.

One of the space rocks the cryms used to reach Earth.

Proof came to them in the form of 4.5 billion-year-old meteorites from Naples' mineralogical museum. Unlike the leftover minerals from alleged bacterial "life processes" found in the famous Martian meteorite (ALH84001), the bacteria in this meteorites sprang to life when mixed with a life-encouraging solution. "When in contact with a physiological solution, they became visible and began to move," D'Argenio claims.

The scientists call the bacteria "cryms" -- short for "crystal microbes." In the lab, the bacteria were duplicated and had their DNA analyzed. Giovanni F. Bignami, scientific director of the Italian Space Agency stated that their "genetic code is unlike any known on Earth."

Expounding on the panspermia theory, Bignami said: "Life would have formed as an initial seed in the protoplanetary nebula from which all the planets originated. This microorganism can be found ... in planetary bodies and in the meteors fallen to Earth." And the researches have found these bacteria all over the Earth. Fifty rock samples, from five continents, turned up identical organisms.

This left the door open to critics, like biologist Martino Rizzotti of Padua University: "I'm skeptical, very skeptical. Those bacteria seem to be too similar to the terrestrial ones. I can't avoid thinking about possible contaminations." But Bignami counters that the samples were heated to 950-degrees Celsius and further sterilized with alcohol before the experiment.

Have no fear of alien's taking over the Earth: antibiotics easily kill-off the microbes.

(This is not the first report of alien microbes on Earth: see NewsNotes for 12.15.00: "They're Here?")

Toward a Blue-Green Red-Planet

University of Florida; April 26, 2001; Press Release: "Genetically Modified Earth Plants Will Glow from Mars'"

Thoughts of plant-life on Mars have been with us for a long time.  Astronomers, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, believed the changing patterns they telescopically viewed on Mars were due to plants blooming and dieing with the Martian seasons.  Later, science fiction writers and movie-makers populated the planet with speculative, weird plant-life. 

But, space-age knowledge makes us aware of the difficulty in anything living on Mars, in its current climatic state: atmospheric moisture below 1%, the thin atmosphere, unable to retain heat, leads to frigid days and 200-degrees F. temperature drops at night.  Orbital and ground-based images attest to the absence of growing patches on the planet -- not even moss on a rock.

Mars though, is the perfect setting for a surreal sci-fi-come-true event.  Of all the planets an astronaut may set foot on, Mars would be most reminiscent of Earth.  The atmosphere, though thin, would form a star-less daylight sky, vaulting above a rock-strewn, desert-like surface, carved-up into volcanic mountains, plains, and canyons.  This familiarly would be offset by the strangeness: the need to wear a pressure suit, difference in gravity, colors of the terrain, and the lack of any plant life.  This last item may change.  For one day, the first human on Mars may find glowing blue and green alien vegetation on the planet -- as strange as anything imagined by the sci-fi writers. 

The astronaut will not be startled at the appearance of these alien plants; these plants will have been transplanted from Earth!  A team of molecular biologists at the University of Florida (UF) are pursuing this idea with a grant from NASA's Human Exploration and Development in Space program.  Transplanting the arabidopsis mustard plant on Mars is the focus or their experiment.  This particular plant was chosen because its genetic sequence has been mapped.  The first part of the experiment is to grow the plant on Mars and have it report back the soil conditions on the red-planet.  For this to happen they've been doing some genetic tinkering.

In 2007 a $300-million seed-bearing spaceship could leave Earth for a rendezvous and landing on Mars.  On the ground, an automated system will scoop and analyze soil from the surface.  Fertilizers, buffers, and nutrients will be added to the soil before it is deposited into the mini-greenhouse on the lander.  Genetically modified arabidopsis mustard plant seeds would be added to the soil.  "Reporter genes," spliced into the plant's genetic code on Earth, would betray conditions in the soil by causing the plant to glow-in-the-dark.  For example, the presence of heavy metals in the soil may cause a plant to glow green, but the occurrence of peroxides would cause a blue glow.  

Data returned by the monitoring the plant glow in the greenhouse would help the same group of University of Florida scientists work on another, long-term, use of plants on Mars: terra-forming.  Plants, introduced on large areas of the Martian surface, could start to convert the carbon dioxide atmosphere of the planet into oxygen for humans to breathe.  "I have no doubt that we can get plants to survive on Mars," says Rob Ferl, assistant director of the Biotechnology Program at UF. "When we do, we will have shown that Earth-evolved life is capable of thriving in distant worlds, and we will have set the stage for human colonization."