NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows on Mars Options

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Dec. 4, 2006

Dwayne Brown/Erica Hupp
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726/1237

Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6278

MEDIA ADVISORY: M06-186

NASA SCHEDULES BRIEFING TO ANNOUNCE SIGNIFICANT FIND ON MARS

WASHINGTON - NASA hosts a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Dec.
6, to present new science results from the Mars Global Surveyor. The
briefing will take place in the NASA Headquarters auditorium located
at 300 E Street, S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA
Television and www.nasa.gov.

The agency last week announced the spacecraft's mission may be at its
end. Mars Global Surveyor has served the longest and been the most
productive of any spacecraft ever sent to the red planet. Data
gathered from the mission will continue to be analyzed by scientists.


Panelists include:
- Michael Meyer -- Lead Scientist, Mars Exploration Program, NASA
Headquarters, Washington
- Michael Malin -- President and Chief Scientist, Malin Space Science
Systems, San Diego, Calif.
- Kenneth Edgett -- Scientist, Malin Space Science Systems
- Philip Christensen -- Professor, Arizona State University, Tempe,
Ariz.

[aldo12xu]

I looked at the Planetary Protection Guidelines posted on the MSL Marsoweb site and it states:

"1. Prepare the landing system to meet Viking post-sterilization cleanliness requirements (controlled cleaning and assembly as noted below, followed by a system-level dry heat microbial reduction step in accordance with NPR 8020.12C), with control of recontamination through launch and delivery to Mars:

Under this option no restrictions on landing sites or on horizontal or vertical mobility into martian special regions would be imposed on the MSL mission by my office.

John D. Rummel, Planetary Protection Officer"


From Planetary Protection Constraints, dated Aug. 23, 2005: http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/...ationLetter.pdf

http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/


So it looks like GoTo sites, like the gullies, would be acceptale

[odave]

John D. Rummel, Planetary Protection Officer

That's quite a job title - I mean, think of the conversation at a BBQ: "so John, what do you do?"

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

That's quite a job title

It is, and now, I believe, it belongs to Dr. Catharine Conley, at least on an interim basis.

As I understand it, Rummel was recently named to replace Dr. Carl Pilcher as Senior Scientist for Astrobiology in SMD's Planetary Sciences Division. Pilcher is moving on to become Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI).

You should listen to the interview of Rummel (last July) on Planetary Radio. Bob Zubrin still gets under his skin

[JRehling]

A question this raises is how a top-notch exploration could be performed of one of these sites when it is active. What is the shortest possible reaction time?

Obviously, committing extravagant resources buys you something in ability to respond.

Detecting these events when they happen would be one part of the capacity. First, the frequency of the events at different candidate sites should be determined. Then, we could have some number of them on a "watchlist" that are monitored frequently. Imagine an orbiter that circled Mars every two hours, checking 12 suspect locations under its apomars at about 45 south.

Then you'd have a lander stashed in an orbit that would "follow" the orbiter, apomars for apomars, in making similar close approaches to the same locations at a "lag time" that allowed operations on Earth to proceed. Let's say the lag time was one sol.

When a positive observation of a gully flow was made, the lander could arrive one day later and settle right onto the gully path. Perhaps show up in time to see successive flows in successive sols.

In situ analysis alone would be the stuff of scientific gluttony, but a tremendous (and very pricey) combo would also settle a sample-return craft downslope (which would seem to ease engineering constraints if that means reducing the slope), allowing a minirover at the flow site to deliver the goodies to the sample return. More exploration of the areas *upslope* would also be interesting.

Clearly, this would be the ultimate "red meat" of solar system exploration: To deliver a sample of liquid water, or stuff that was immediately prior wet with liquid water, back to earthly labs offers an excellent opportunity to get a Big Answer on astrobiology and/or one heck of a giant leap into understanding where ELSE you might have to look in case the sample were (as I bet it would be, FWIW) sterile.

It would also be a hell of an expensive program, with many points of failure, and perhaps too subject to chance if these flows are too rare for the above architecture to produce a likely flow detection before the life of the orbiting elements gives out. Obviously, two-way planetary protection concerns would require superlative measures. And just doing this at all would cost a lot more than any generic sample return mission.

Still, if we don't do this, sooner or later, we've left a stone unturned. We have to do this, eventually.

I think when the MERs were launched we knew far too little about Mars to commit serious resources to lander missions. This event, IMO, changes that. Now we know something very big. We're not going to get a clearer "go ahead" signal than this.