In a forthcoming article in Odyssey, I’ll be suggesting that the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence may be fairly low. If you consider objectively the question of the Fermi Paradox, there’s a strong case for believing that a species such as Homo sapiens is remarkably rare in the universe. There’s nothing new in this conclusion – Alan Bond’s On the Improbability of Intelligent Extra-terrestrials in the May 1982 issue of JBIS just about put the lid on the subject.

Such a message is not generally what space enthusiasts want to hear; they’d prefer to believe in a universe “teeming with life”, as widely promulgated by science communicators such as Carl Sagan. My respect for Sagan has always been immense; his written work in books such as Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot remains fresh and exciting. But he did always seem a little inflexible in his conviction that intelligent civilizations must be widespread throughout our galaxy, let alone throughout the universe as a whole. In their paper Is Mankind Unique? (JBIS, May 1983), Tony Martin and Alan Bond called this belief “Drake-Sagan chauvinism”, and it’s still a pervasive view today. There is however no evidence that it’s true.

I’d be as excited as anyone if tomorrow’s news brings confirmation of advanced life-forms elsewhere in the universe, but I’m not holding my breath. And we need to be alert to the dangers of trying to contact extraterrestrials in the first place. As David Brin, who was interviewed in Odyssey 23, has observed: if everyone else is keeping quiet (which is certainly what SETI has indicated so far,) perhaps they know something we don’t, and we should think about doing the same.

The problem was considered in Paul Shuch and Ivan Almar’s paper Shouting in the Dark: The SETI Transmission Debate (JBIS, April 2007). The authors had previously proposed the San Marino Scale to quantify the possible exposure and risk from attempting to contact ETI. When talking about sending signals to extraterrestrials, they accepted that “the probability of negative consequences from terrestrial transmissions is non-zero”, and concluded that planned missions from Earth should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. There needs to be some caution.

The idea of an alien invasion has been rehearsed so often in science fiction that it’s difficult to know where to start. It’s certainly been around since H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. Aliens don’t always have to be aggressive, of course. Michael Rennie’s Klaatu in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still was a dignified, peaceful character. And not surprisingly for someone who always viewed extraterrestrial life in such a positive and upbeat way, the aliens in Sagan’s own 1985 novel Contact didn’t cause much trouble – all the aggravation came from the human end of the exchange.

But we also should bear in mind the warning from a famous physicist in his 2010 documentary series Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking – we should be very cautious about hoping for contact with an advanced space-faring civilization; the effect on humanity, regardless of any intentions that the aliens might have, could be calamitous, comparable to the detrimental effect which European settlers had on Native Americans.

There’s a good argument that any species which has developed interstellar flight will probably have overcome its aggressive urges. Even so, a civilization immensely superior to ours might have no qualms in exterminating an obnoxious, potentially dangerous species; to them we might be no more than an irritating wasp’s nest. Any sufficiently advanced civilization will have devastating effects on human culture, regardless of their intentions. Just think how the witch-doctor, faced for the first time with European science, felt when he realised his lifetime’s study of magic was worthless.

Our culture would seem pitiful in comparison. Our aliens may look at the work of Newton or Einstein, or Mozart or Shakespeare, and recognise our potential; but all that would be irrelevant once our culture is swamped. On the other hand, imagine what our visitors might bring – a limitless pollution-free source of power, cures to all the diseases which have troubled us throughout history, and the latest inter-galactic bestseller which makes all human literature look like a child’s scribbling. It would be overwhelming.

Clifford Simak described such a situation in his 1953 science fiction short-story Kindergarten. Faced with the immense power of a superior civilization we can barely comprehend, no matter how friendly and well-meaning it might be towards us, all we can do is go back to school and effectively start again. We must just hope that the teacher is someone we can relate to.

There would be resistance to such changes, of course. Arthur C. Clarke explained that all too well in his novel Childhood’s End; but the dominating presence of our new Overlords would make any opposition futile. Inevitably, some people whose whole lives had been devoted to achieving supremacy in their chosen fields would feel just like the witch-doctor. They might even reject the new order entirely and hope, probably in vain, to continue on as before. However, speaking as just another citizen of the galaxy, if they are “out there,” with all that a superior culture may have to offer, I say: Bring it on!

Carl Sagan was an optimistic believer in ETI but does the Fermi Paradox undermine such beliefs?

Proving that not all alien interventions need be hostile: Michael Rennie’s portrayal of the peace-seeking emissary from another world in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still

Clifford Simak’s short-story, Kindergarten, which warned of the perils of contact with extra-terrestrial civilisations, appeared in several anthologies including this one from 1956.

About the Author:
Richard Hayes is a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and the Royal Astronomical Society. He is the assistant editor of the BIS monthly e-newsletter, Odyssey where this article originally appeared and the writer of the Odyssey’s regular “Radical Vectors” column. He says, “I needed to make a decision on retirement on whether to pursue my interests in accountancy, or my life-long interests in spaceflight and astronomy. I suspect I thought about it for all of five seconds!”

The media availability participants are:

•   William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator, human exploration and operations, NASA
•   Robert Bigelow, founder and president, Bigelow Aerospace

Journalists who want to attend in-person at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St. SW in Washington, or dial-in to ask questions should contact Rachel Kraft at rachel.h.kraft@nasa.gov or 202-358-1100 by 11 a.m. May 23.

Under the agreement, Bigelow will work with a variety of commercial space companies to assess and develop options for innovative and dynamic private and public investments to create infrastructure to support domestic and international governmental exploration activities alongside revenue generating private sector enterprises. Bigelow will deliver its analysis by the end of this year.

The agreement includes a two-phased approach that will help NASA assess potential opportunities for collaboration. During the first phase, Bigelow will leverage its existing relationships with other private companies and its expertise from continuing operations in space to form common objectives between the private sector and NASA. In the second phase, Bigelow will create a series of options for public-private collaboration that lower costs and takes advantage of rapid implementation.

For more information on Bigelow Aerospace, visit:

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com

For more information on NASA’s exploration goals, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration

Plans call for delivering portions of the sample in coming days to laboratory instruments inside the rover. This is only the second time that a sample has been collected from inside a rock on Mars. The first was Curiosity’s drilling at a target called “John Klein” three months ago. Cumberland resembles John Klein and lies about nine feet (2.75 meters) farther west. Both are within a shallow depression called “Yellowknife Bay.”

The hole that Curiosity drilled into Cumberland on May 19 is about 0.6 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter and about 2.6 inches (6.6 centimeters) deep.

The science team expects to use analysis of material from Cumberland to check findings from John Klein. Preliminary findings from analysis of John Klein rock powder by Curiosity’s onboard laboratory instruments indicate that the location long ago had environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. The favorable conditions included the key elemental ingredients for life, an energy gradient that could be exploited by microbes, and water that was not harshly acidic or briny.

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess the history of habitable environmental conditions inside Gale Crater. After a few more high-priority observations by the rover within and near Yellowknife Bay, the rover team plans to start Curiosity on a months-long trek to the base of a layered mound, Mount Sharp, at the middle of the crater. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://www.nasa.gov/msl andhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at:http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity

by merryl azriel

The International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS) has awarded the 2013 Jerome Lederer Safety Pioneer Award to Art Thompson and the Red Bull Stratos team who made possible Felix Baumgartner’s recordbreaking stratospheric skydive in October 2012.

“Art Thompson and The Red Bull Stratos Team have substantially advanced the human knowledge and capability for using high altitude parachuting as a means for ensuring safe crew escape during at least part of a space mission and possibly one day ‘parachuting from space’ in case of emergencies,” explains IAASS President Tommaso Sgobba.

Art Thompson was Technical Project Director and the engineer behind the Red Bull Stratos capsule. Known for his creative approach to technical challenges, Thompson’s work has encompassed development of the B-2 stealth bomber for Northrop Corporation and design of the Batmobile for the film Batman & Robin. He co-founded Sage Cheshire Aerospace Inc., which took on the Red Bull Stratos challenge. The Red Bull Stratos team also includes space safety advocate and six-time NASA Space Shuttle crew surgeon Jonathan Clark who served as medical director for the undertaking, mentor and prior record holder Joe Kittinger, life support engineer Mike Todd, program manager and senior flight test engineer Marle Hewett, skydiving consultant Luke Aikins, and high performance director Andy Walshe.

The Jerome Lederer Space Safety Pioneer Award is awarded biennially to an individual or group who has made outstanding contributions in the field of space safety. The award consists of a solid silver handmade statuette reproducing the “Winged Victory,” or Nike (Greek for “victory”) of Samothrace, standing on a hemisphere representing the surface of Mars.

The award is named in honor of Jerome Lederer, an American aviation-safety pioneer. In 1947, Lederer organized the Flight Safety Foundation and was its director until 1967. In 1967, following the deaths of three astronauts at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA appointed Lederer director of the Office of Manned Space Flight Safety for the Apollo Program. In 1970, he became director of safety for all of NASA.

The award will be presented at the upcoming IAASS Conference Gala Dinner on May 22 in Montreal, Canada.

Meet the Team behind Red Bull Stratos:

Capable of carrying up to 24 nanosatellite units, or more than 100 pounds of secondary payloads into orbit, the deployer is complete and ready for flight. NLAS is designed to sit beneath a primary spacecraft and connect it to the upper stage of a rocket. Standing a mere ten inches tall, NLAS is short enough to squeeze various configurations of cubesats, such as 3-unit satellites that measure approximately 14 inches long, 4 inches wide and 4 inches high, or 6-unit satellites that measure approximately 14 inches long, 9 inches wide and 4 inches high.

Engineers expect that several NLAS could be stacked in a launch vehicle, allowing a single launch to bring dozens of small satellites to orbit. Once the primary spacecraft is safely delivered to orbit, NLAS deploys its payloads successively to their destinations, sometimes in a constellation.

A standard cubesat measures about four inches (10 cm) long, four inches wide, and four inches high, and is called a one-unit (1U) cubesat. A single NLAS provides the capability to deploy 24U of cubesats. – NASA Ames

“The launch adapter greatly enhances NASA’s ability to rapidly deploy small low-cost satellites to space,” said David Korsmeyer, director of engineering at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. “We expect this will improve NASA’s opportunities to fly small satellite missions as secondary payloads and lead to greater opportunities for more complex and efficient spacecraft launches in the future.”

This NLAS flight demonstration is expected to show the potential value of multiple, small satellites as tools for a wide array of scientific, commercial, and academic space research. Other goals of the project include reducing the cost and time required to integrate nanosatellites to rockets.

Each time a rocket launches, it must be painstakingly balanced using ballast – which can be sand, water or metal used as a balancing mechanism – to ensure its trajectory is accurate. Nanosatellites and their deployment systems also can act as ballasts during launches.

“Small spacecraft have the advantage of being able to share launches with other spacecraft, reducing the launch cost to the spacecraft developer team. This allows us to launch a number of these smallsats in support of NASA’s space technology goals,” said Bruce Yost, the program manager for the Small Spacecraft Technology Program at NASA Ames.”

NLAS was designed and constructed by a team of experts from the Mission Design Division at Ames, commercial entities, and other government agencies. NASA Ames employees built the NLAS deployer using off-the-shelf components and specially crafted parts designed to standard dimensions for 1-, 3- and 6-unit nanosatellites launched from a variety of rockets, including Falcon 1 and Minotaur 1. NLAS is jointly funded by the Small Spacecraft Technology Program of the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington and NASA Ames.

For more information about the Mission Design Division at NASA Ames, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/engineering/divisions/missiondesign

For more about information about NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/smallsats

For more about information about NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/engineering/divisions/missiondesign For more about information about NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/smallsats For more about information about NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/spacetech” target=”_blank”>http://www.nasa.gov/spacetech

On the drawing he listed key aspects: “1. Long duration. 2. Reusability of Expt Mod (experiment module) 3. Logistic Resupply. 19 Aug 1966 1905 CST”

George Mueller’s concept drawing that led to what became Skylab. – NASA — /// CLCIK TO ENLARGE

Muller had sketched the first blueprint for what would become Skylab, launched 40 years ago, May 14, 1973.

The basic idea was not new. For years space engineers had envisioned converting expended rocket tanks into space stations. After all, the two items contain a pressurized fluid, either rocket fuel or crew air.

Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer who would later direct NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in the late 1950s had outlined Project Horizon, a then-classified U.S. Army concept for a large manned moon base. In 1958, Krafft Ehricke at General Dynamics designed Outpost, an Atlas ballistic missile converted in orbit into a space station. In either case the rocket stage was just 10 feet wide, making for cozy accommodations.

Earth-orbit space stations lost priority on May 25, 1961, when President Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the Moon “before this decade is out.” That refocused everyone’s efforts and, ironically, improved options for a space station.

Going to the Moon required an immense rocket. What evolved was the Saturn V, with first and second stages set at 33 feet in diameter, and the third stage at nearly 22 feet. Even while all hands turned to designing and building the massive rocket, many at NASA were considering other missions for Apollo hardware, including the third stage. Douglas Aircraft, builder of the third stage, had been pushing such an idea for some time. And the Soviet Union used a similar approach in its Salyut series of space stations starting in late 1971.

What started as the Apollo Extension System soon became the Apollo Applications Program, or AAP. The Huntsville team envisioned a “wet workshop,” using the smaller Saturn IB rocket to orbit its second stage, virtually identical to the Saturn V’s S-IVB third stage, with a docking adapter and other gear attached. An astronaut crew would be launched next to outfit the stage’s roomy liquid hydrogen tank – almost 22 feet wide – as an orbital workshop. Later flights would add a Lunar Module outfitted with an array of telescopes to study the Sun.

But problems with early spacewalks on the Gemini missions showed that working in space was more challenging than expected. What if the astronauts couldn’t get things assembled and working? Some engineers started promoting the idea of a “dry workshop” that would be assembled on the ground and open for business hours after arriving in space.

The turning point came in 1969 when Mueller discovered a bit of bootleg engineering. Von Braun and his team had built an immense swimming pool, 80 feet wide and 40 feet deep, where spacecraft mockups could be submerged for space-suited engineers to test spacewalk procedures. Despite not being formally approved, Mueller liked it and took a turn.

He came out realizing that outfitting the wet workshop was impractical.

“Once I tried even the simple task of closing the valves between the tanks,” Mueller recalled in Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, “it convinced me that we wouldn’t rebuild and refurbish the tank in orbit, so that led me to the decision to go with the dry workshop.”

It would be a turn-key operation: Launch the “dry workshop” — the fully converted S-IVB and the Apollo Telescope Mount with solar telescopes — atop a two-stage Saturn V, activate remotely, launch the crew the next week on a Saturn IB, and go to work in what was now called Skylab.

But to paraphrase Rick in Casablanca, “It seems that destiny has taken a hand.” A major mishaps that almost destroyed the station forced NASA to contrive repairs that involved spacewalks more complex and daring than what they had tried to avoid by switching to the dry workshop.

Skylab’s original design included a micrometeoroid shield that would expand outward by a few inches from the pressure vessel. It was retained as the solar shield even after new data showed that the micrometeoroid hazard was not as great as once feared.

But Skylab engineers made a crucial error. The stowed shield was not attached tightly to the stage, and 63 seconds after liftoff, aerodynamic effects ripped the shield from the workshop, and damaged a solar array enough that it later pulled away. Some of the debris struck the interstage, the cylinder joining first and second stages. Film of this cleanly falling away in the first Saturn V launch, Apollo 4, is one of the most-used space movie clips. On this last flight, the damage from the falling shield held it in place.

Now came one of the weirdest coincidences in space history. The interstage was a massive structure, weighing almost five tons. Lugging that along would have placed Skylab in a lower orbit than planned, perhaps too low to be safely manned.

But the interstage also increased the thrust of the second stage just enough to make up the difference. Even though a rocket’s exhaust is directed downward, in the upper reaches of the atmosphere a small amount will recirculate around the base of the rocket. On Skylab, the stuck interstage acted like a large nozzle extension, trapping some of that recirculating exhaust so it pushed upward instead of outward in all directions.

Skylab safely reached orbit and NASA soon was grappling with how to repair it in orbit. In the end, NASA managers would declare that Skylab was more successful broken than if everything had worked as planned because they were able to demonstrate the utility to humans in space.

Those activities are for later stories in this series.

—–

This article draws from Skylab: A Chronology (NASA SP-4011) and Homesteading space: the Skylab story by David Hitt, Owen K. Garriott, Joe Kerwin, and Alan Bean (Bison Books, 2011).

Dave Dooling is education director at the New Mexico Museum of Space History. He is a former space journalist and past recipient of the National Space Club’s Press Award and Goddard History Essay Award.

I am reading the new book “Mission to Mars, My Vision for Space Exploration”, by Buzz Aldrin. The book is a very good read, and for those of us who know Buzz, it is pretty much as we expect and have heard from Buzz for years. There is some good information in the book and it is hoped that this will help to stimulate discussion on the subject. Following is my blow by blow review of the book while I read it….

The book opens with Buzz and president Obama on Air Force 1 headed to Florida for Obama’s one major speech on space. If you are a Mars or a Lunar advocate the speech was not satisfying as the focus of the speech was away from the Moon, but not to Mars, rather to an asteroid mission for humans. Those of us who know some of the inner workings understand that this is because there is no budget for any lander, lunar or otherwise.

Buzz does help to perpetuate the common myth and wrong interpretation of the Augustine 2008 commission that the Bush plan for the Vision for Space Exploration which morphed into the Constellation program was underfunded (p94). You have to look no farther than the NASA Concept Exploration and Refinement (CE&R) contracts of 2005 to see the original plans did not require this level of funding. In searching, I find it amazing that you cannot find the CE&R contract reports online easily anymore. However, this AIAA paper goes into some of the issues regarding how architecture choices drive the cost. The Constellation program that came after the departure of Bush’s handpicked leader (Sean O’Keefe), requiring multiple heavy lift vehicles and a Battlestar Galactica style lunar lander that killed the program and this must be repeated every time the Bush “unaffordable” myth is trotted out.

Buzz opens with a call for something that I completely agree with, which is his Aldrin cycler design. The Aldrin cycler is a true spaceship that continuously operates in space, cycling between the Earth and the Moon or the Earth and Mars. While others came up with this as well Buzz has done the heavy lifting to put this concept out over the last 20-30 years. He makes a great quote here… (p37)

Long ago the sound barrier was penetrated and tamed. Now we need to break through the reusability barricade, one that has been perpetuated, in my view, by the greed of government bureaucracy and corporate industry…

The problem is that he is relying on these same people and on positive political forces to set up a sustained vision for Mars colonization by humans. Our politicians today are for the most part incapable of understanding the value of this all important vision that Buzz and the rest of us have in this area.

Where I disagree with him, as he knows, is in his blunt evaluation that the Moon should be some part of an international camping trip where we bring all of the countries of the world together. He uses the Antarctic research sites as his analogs frequently but the fact of the matter is that this internationalism does not work even there. While there is a lot of cooperation, each nation has its own facility. Even on ISS the Japanese consider their Kibo module to be sovereign Japanese territory. What makes me crazy is that Buzz says this… (p89)

…In short, our celestial neighbor in gravitational lock, the moon, can be tapped to help create a sustainable economic, industrial, and science generating expansion into space…

YES!, however Buzz wants to hand it off to the rest of the world? Inconceivable!

Buzz Basics in Technology

Buzz has a laundry list of technologies that are a good start for Mars.

Aerocapture, which is using the atmosphere of planet to slow a spacecraft down.

Radiation protection, we don’t want to fry the humans, which is going to get more difficult with the coming extremely low solar activity over the next decades.

Life support, self evident yep and trying it out on ISS makes perfect sense…

Redundant Systems, absolutely, as well as advanced diagnostics and repair!

Inflatable structures, a good thing to have but possibly distracting

Landing systems, absolutely as gravity sucks and takes a lot of fuel as well as precision navigation for landing as he states.

However, this for Mars this is far more about the mission there than actually staying there. To add to his list.

Energy Systems, the life and death of developing Mars is how much electrical and thermal energy is available.

In Situ Resources, that this keeps getting left off the list is inconceivable!

In Situ Manufacturing, this is what turns a science project into mankind’s second home.

Robotics, mankind’s ultimate force multiplier for off planet civilization.

Buzz goes on to talk about some initial flights to Mars and some interesting information that I did not know, which is that the Martian moon Deimos has ten months a year in sunlight. This helps in the beginning with solar power. Buzz has some interesting graphics related to his plans in the color plates but unfortunately you need a magnifying glass to read them. I found a link on his site to at least one of them though.

Homesteading the Red Planet

I absolutely love the idea that Mars exploration and development by humans be a one way affair. After first hearing about this idea a few years ago I have grown to completely embrace it as a core value myself for Mars. Finally on page 174 Buzz mentions the word ISRU, without which colonizing Mars is a fools errand. In a very interesting observation Buzz recounts that that Bruce Mackenzie’s team at the Mars Foundation has investigated making plastics like ethylene, derived from the atmosphere of Mars along with hydrogen. That is very interesting (p181).

Buzz talks about Bob Zubrin’s Mars Direct architecture (p184) which I very much like as well as the use of in-situ resources starts in the beginning and is a core value, rather than something that comes later. This page is also where I get irked in that Buzz just offhandedly states (from Mars Direct) that;

In the first year of implementation, and Earth return vehicle is launched to Mars, arriving six months later. Upon landing on the surface, a rover is deployed that contains the nuclear reactors necessary to generate rocket fuel for the return trip.

This is another version of “then a miracle occurs” which so irks me so much when the development of Mars is discussed.

Thoughts

As a fellow space architect I really like Buzz’s book. It does not go much farther than other books of the genre but since it is written by one of the surviving 12 Apollo surface astronauts it carries his significant weight behind it. I have always admired Buzz over the years for his single minded dedication to teaching the world of the continuing value of the human exploration and development of space. While he and I disagree on what the initial target should be we share a common goal. I know that this book is written for the general reader and that details are to be left for interactions with stakeholders and politicians. However, I must discuss one final lament about the book.

What is needed now is a practical roadmap to getting to Mars and colonizing it in a sustainable manner. It is quite clear that unless a miracle occurs our current generation of political leadership does not think far enough ahead to understand the macro-societial benefits that Buzz talks about. This is tragic in that in microcosm the development of the Moon or Mars fits within a macrocosm of discussion related to our own terrestrial civilization. The problem of colonizing and building a sustainable Martian civilization has many commonalities with building a sustainable planetary civilization here on the Earth.

The first and most important resource for Mars or the Earth is energy. This is glossed over for Mars (just deploy the reactors!) or misunderstood here on the Earth (green fixations that solar panels and wind turbines can power a planetary civilization of 9 billion people). An in depth discussion of the Energy required to support a prosperous colony of 50, 100, or a thousand people on Mars is desperately required as it will start to bring clarity to Martian development as well as sustainable development here on the Earth. We need a discussion of how a manufacturing infrastructure would be set up on Mars as without it homesteading Mars is impossible. Then an examination in detail of what we know about the resources and how they would be developed. In the end this is why I advocate the Moon in that in my opinion it is the combination of lunar and martian industrialization that are going to be the critical advances that help us to build a sustainable and prosperous planetary civilization here on the Earth.

Buzz I salute you for your book and that it opens the door for a new generation to learn about Mars and why it is important. However, like Moses at Rephidim where Aaron and Hur had to hold up his arms in order for the children of Israel to win a fight, we need to hold his arms up and help to flesh out the vision presented. There have been so many crucial advances in the past five years in the areas of robotics, 3D printing/manufacturing, and computer resources that simply must be integrated into our planning for Mars and the Moon. Time for another book I guess!

Dennis Wingo is an advocate for the discussion of ways and means for the economic development of the solar system, to the benefit of the Earth. He writes the euphonious blog Dennis Wingo.

The fractured rock, called “Esperance,” provides evidence about a wet ancient environment possibly favorable for life. The mission’s principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., said, “Esperance was so important, we committed several weeks to getting this one measurement of it, even though we knew the clock was ticking.”

The mission’s engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., had set this week as a deadline for starting a drive toward “Solander Point,” where the team plans to keep Opportunity working during its next Martian winter.

“What’s so special about Esperance is that there was enough water not only for reactions that produced clay minerals, but also enough to flush out ions set loose by those reactions, so that Opportunity can clearly see the alteration,” said Scott McLennan of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a long-term planner for Opportunity’s science team.

This rock’s composition is unlike any other Opportunity has investigated during nine years on Mars — higher in aluminum and silica, lower in calcium and iron.

The next destination, Solander Point, and the area Opportunity is leaving, Cape York, both are segments of the rim of Endeavour Crater, which spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) across. The planned driving route to Solander Point is about 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers). Cape York has been Opportunity’s home since the rover arrived at the western edge of Endeavour in mid-2011 after a two-year trek from a smaller crater.

“Based on our current solar-array dust models, we intend to reach an area of 15 degrees northerly tilt before Opportunity’s sixth Martian winter,” said JPL’s Scott Lever, mission manager. “Solander Point gives us that tilt and may allow us to move around quite a bit for winter science observations.”

Northerly tilt increases output from the rover’s solar panels during southern-hemisphere winter. Daily sunshine for Opportunity will reach winter minimum in February 2014. The rover needs to be on a favorable slope well before then.

The first drive away from Esperance covered 81.7 feet (24.9 meters) on May 14. Three days earlier, Opportunity finished exposing a patch of the rock’s interior with the rock abrasion tool. The team used a camera and spectrometer on the robotic arm to examine Esperance.

The team identified Esperance while exploring a portion of Cape York where the Compact Reconnaissance Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had detected a clay mineral. Clays typically form in wet environments that are not harshly acidic. For years, Opportunity had been finding evidence for ancient wet environments that were very acidic. The CRISM findings prompted the rover team to investigate the area where clay had been detected from orbit. There, they found an outcrop called “Whitewater Lake,” containing a small amount of clay from alteration by exposure to water.

“There appears to have been extensive, but weak, alteration of Whitewater Lake, but intense alteration of Esperance along fractures that provided conduits for fluid flow,” Squyres said. “Water that moved through fractures during this rock’s history would have provided more favorable conditions for biology than any other wet environment recorded in rocks Opportunity has seen.”

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project launched Opportunity to Mars on July 7, 2003, about a month after its twin rover, Spirit. Both were sent for three-month prime missions to study the history of wet environments on ancient Mars and continued working in extended missions. Spirit ceased operations in 2010.

Opportunity Heads Toward Next Destination, ‘Solander Point’. – NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona — /// CLICK TO ENLARGE
This map of a portion of the western rim of Endeavour Crater on Mars shows the area where NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity worked for 20 months, “Cape York,” in relation to the area where the rover team plans for Opportunity to spend its sixth Martian winter, “Solander Point.”
The scale bar at lower left is 200 meters (one-eighth of a mile). The inset at upper left indicates the location of the mapped area in relation to the entire Endeavour Crater, which is 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. Both Cape York and Solander Point are raised sections of the crater’s western rim.
Opportunity arrived at the edge of Endeavour Crater in August 2011 after a two-year trek from Victoria Crater, where it had spent two years. Observations by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected traces of clay minerals in a portion of Cape York, and the rover team used that information to guide Opportunity’s exploration of the area. Opportunity finished its inspection of targeted rocks on Cape York with examination of “Esperance,” indicated on this map. Esperance was found to have a composition suggesting the presence of clay minerals formed by water intensely altering the rock.
Solander Point has a north-facing slope favorable for electrical output by Opportunity’s solar panels during the coming southern-hemisphere winter. The minimum-sunshine days of the winter will be in February 2014. The rover team plans to get Opportunity to a northerly tilt well before then. The anticipated drive distance from Esperance to Solander Point is about 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers). Opportunity began that trek on May 14, 2013.
The base image for this map is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. For more about Opportunity, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/rovers and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov . You can follow the project on Twitter and on Facebook at: http://twitter.com/MarsRovers and http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers .