Happy Anniversary, Opportunity

With all the fuss being made over dear Curiosity landing on Mars last year (which I still contribute to), it became far too easy for us to forget about Opportunity, another rover already trekking around the surface of the red planet.

We love ‘em and leave ‘em up there, to be sure. Poor little robots.

But Opportunity made a name for itself and Mars research long before Curiosity dropped down on its sky crane. In fact, today marks the 9 year anniversary of Opportunity’s own landing. Opportunity wasn’t lowered down by fancy crane, but instead bounced onto the surface of Mars on giant airbags along with its twin rover, Spirit. The rovers were expected to do their little robot research for 3 months…

Turns out, both were a bit more dedicated to science than NASA planned. Spirit continued operating until 2010, and Opportunity is still going strong and is now starting its 10th year on Mars (meaning it’s lasted 36 times the three months it was supposed to).

But, as JPL’s John Callas, manager of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project, said:

What’s most important is not how long it has lasted or even how far it has driven, but how much exploration and scientific discovery Opportunity has accomplished.

Too true. After all, it was the work of Opportunity that gave us the first hard evidence that there had once been flowing water on the Martian surface (As an aside here, my galleons, do you lot remember receiving the news of that find? Because I do. Man, I was beyond excited. I can still remember us all talking about it in our algebra class. One of those rare times science got a front-row seat over celebrity gossip and hunting stories.). And it’s still up there, rolling along, doing some science.

Right now, while Curiosity continues getting the limelight over in Yellowknife Bay, Opportunity is on the other side of the planet at Endeavor Crater, looking around for some clay. Scientists are hoping to find specific minerals (like smectite) in the clay around the crater, which would indicate there had previously been Martian water with less acidity than previous water sites Opportunity has discovered in its 9 year sojourn. These minerals would speak of an environment more hospitable to life.

Interestingly enough, this means that Opportunity is moving to the next phase of the Mars Program architecture, going from simply “Following the Water” to “Determining Habitability”. This was something Opportunity was never supposed to do (and is actually Curiosity’s mission).

While there’s enough science to be done up there for both robots, I can’t help but quietly think, “You show that young whippersnapper, Opportunity.” Curiosity certainly has big shoes to fill, but Opportunity’s not quite ready to take them off yet. Opportunity is a grand scientific accomplishment, both for its own amazing self and the incredible work its doing.

Our hats are off to you, Opportunity. Happy anniversary.

Imma Comin’ For Ya, Curiosity

Galleons, do you remember when you were a kid and you got your first bike? Oh, the freedom. Oh, the speed. Oh, the places you’d go on that shiny white bicycle. At least, that’s what you thought. The reality was far more limited in scope. While you might have that lovely new bike capable of taking you all over the neighborhood, you were made to ride circles around your block (safe from the perils of oh-so-dangerous street crossing, but not from your asshat brother throwing rocks at you as you rode by your front lawn).

Sometimes, though, you’d get to the backside of the block and stop. You’d look around, as if expecting your mother to be standing behind you, watching your every move for signs of deviancy. You’d see the coast was, in fact, clear. And you’d see that stop sign across the street. A simple thing, the stop sign. But it became this beacon. You had to get over there. You had to just touch the thing. You had to prove that you were old enough and responsible enough and just plain badass enough to cross that fucking street.

And so, you did. You darted across the street, little legs pumping furiously. And you stood on that corner for a moment, your hand sliding down the warm metal signpost, your heart racing, a huge grin plastered on your face. A small thing, but an important one. You’d cross that street again with a new confidence, ride lazily to your backyard, park your bike, pet the dog, and ignore your brother as he whines about never getting to leave the yard. You don’t care. You are the master of the road.

When we went to the moon, it was like darting across that road all over again. It was the first taste of that freedom, that adventure, that we’d been yearning for as we built our first shuttles. But we never went any further than that. Instead, we endlessly circle our cosmic block in our space station, looking out across that metaphorical road and yearning to visit the other side, to see what’s beyond

Right now, robots (even ones I have completely anthropomorphized to be something like an SUV-sized WALL-E) are the lone colonists of our red neighbor. It’s like the 7-11 two blocks away that we don’t dare to visit but want to because we desperately want a Slurpee. Oh, we say we’re going to go. We keep promising we’ll try. Russia’s even locking astronauts away for months at a time to study how the prolonged isolation of such a trip would affect people.

A big barrier to space travel beyond our own moon is that space is just so… vast. As we all learned from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

And because space is so goddamn big, it makes travel through it a bit of a knotty issue. It just takes too damn long to get anywhere. Hell, it would take 6-8 months alone to get to Mars. Fucking Mars. The planet right the fuck next to us.

But what if I told you we’re currently developing an engine that would cut that down to just three month? An engine that ran on, oh, motherfucking dilithium crystals.

I’m not even kidding, dear galleons. Right now,  a team at the University of Hunstville, working in collaboration with Boeing, NASA and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, are developing a fusion engine that would use deuterium and lithium-6 (okay, so it’s not quite dilithium, but it’s close) in a crystalline structure as fuel.

The Charger-1 Pulsed Power Generator, as they’re calling it, would pass millions of amps through thin lithium wires to generate up to three terawatts of power. The wires would then vaporize into plasma, which would be collapsed into the deuterium/lithium-6 core. Under such high pressures, deuterium and lithium-6 undergo a fusion reaction.

And BAM! An engine twice as fast as what we’re currently working with. An engine that could hurtle us through space at 100,000 km/h (about how fast the Earth travels around the sun).

Of course, this is still in the early stages. In fact, fusion isn’t even a fully viable fuel source quite yet, though we’re making some enormous strides in that arena. Maybe we’ll soon be able to send people to Mars.

You know, so the robots aren’t so lonely.

Solar Sugar Daddy

What’s your favorite thing about space? Mine is space. ~Space Core, Portal 2

So, my galleons, when you think of space, I bet the first thing that pops into your mind isn’t sugar. And yet, a rather exciting find from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility with just the most bitchin’ radio telescope array this side of anywhere, deals precisely with those winsome little carbohydrates.

Now, space sugars have been detected before, but what makes this particular sugar spotting so special is where it’s located. Glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar, has been found in the gas surrounding a young binary star (which is of similar mass to Sol herself), called IRAS 16293-2422. The gas cloud isn’t just hanging right up there, breathing down the star’s metaphorical neck, but hanging out about the distance of Uranus from our own sun. So, in astronomical terms… yeah, the cloud’s a clingy little creeper. And it’s that same proximity to the star that makes this particular batch of space sugar so intriguing, because it means that the sugar’s been in the system since the planets were formed.

You know what this means, right? It means sugar, containing little ol’ carbons and hydrogens and oxygens, have been hanging around this system during planet formation. As Jes Jørgensen of Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute states:

This molecule is one of the ingredients in the formation of RNA, which — like DNA, to which it is related — is one of the building blocks of life.

The building blocks of life being seeded to these freshly developing worlds. Are you all atingle as well, dear galleons?

And not only has the sugar been hanging out in this system all along, it’s actually falling in toward the star, giving them an even higher chance of ending up on the newly formed planets.

It’s one of the first finds from ALMA, which technically isn’t complete yet- it’s in the verification phase where observations by the telescope array are being checked to make sure they meet the high quality standard expected of the project. ALMA is scheduled to be complete and fully operational in 2013, so this is just the start of its journey into the inner workings of star and star system formation. Its unparalleled sensitivity (due, in large part, to the sheer number of telescopes hooked up in the installation- 66, for the curious) will allow it to study details of gas and dust discs within star systems previously unavailable to us. So for one of its first real discoveries to be this sugar is pretty spectacular. It appears that ALMA is going to be able to give us incredible information about how planetary systems form and, perhaps, about how life could (and did, at least once) arise within them.

The team plans to keep an eye on the sugars in the IRAS 16293-2422 system. As Jørgensen said:

A big question is: how complex can these molecules become before they are incorporated into new planets? This could tell us something about how life might arise elsewhere, and ALMA observations are going to be vital to unravel this mystery.

I mean, unraveling the mysteries of the universe? This is what science is all about. Good job, ALMA.

Curiouser and Curiouser

So, I think it was a given that today’s post was going to be about the Curiosity rover’s fate. And, as I’m sure you’re all aware, dear galleons, Curiosity landed without a problem and is currently hanging out on the Martian surface:

I IS ON MARS NAO

But what you might NOT realize is what is inside that big ol’ rover.

Me.

Well, not me exactly. It’s SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars), which is a big box of science-y goodness tucked inside Curiosity. SAM is a successor to the twin Viking experiments of 1976-77, experiments which detected positive results for life on the red planet at both Viking landing sites (Chryse Planitia and Utopia Planitia). The simple version of the experiment had one of the Viking landers gather some soil and treat it with a solution containing small, organic chemicals labeled with radioactive carbon. These soil samples then released a gas. We don’t actually know which gas was released. The creator of the experiment, Gilbert Levin, believes it was carbon dioxide released from the oxidation of organic chemicals, but it’s also likely the gas was methane. What we do know, however, is that when we heated the samples to temperatures high enough to kill most Earth microbes, the gas was no longer released.

For some, this was proof we’d found life on Mars, but others were… less certain. Another experiment on the landers failed to find any evidence of organic matter in the soil samples.

Since then, we’ve found potential fossilized life in meteorites originating from Mars, but those initial Viking findings remain fuzzy. And by Feynman’s bongos, we want to know if there’s life on the rock next door. It’s a staple of science fiction, an idea most of us have toyed with- the idea that life exists, not just somewhere else in the wide, wide universe, but right here in our own neighborhood.

SAM is working to settle the question once and for all. While it’s not the only question Curiosity is up there to answer, it’s certainly a big one.

Galleons, meet SAM:

SAM is equipped with some badass gear. Its own chemical separation and processing laboratory, quadrupole mass spectrometer, gas chromatograph, tunable laser spectrometer… this baby is one sick science package. With more advanced instruments than Viking, SAM’s gonna figure this shit out. Scanning the soil, scanning the atmosphere… Curiosity and SAM are going to be busy.

I expect you’ll hear a lot more from me… er, from SAM, in the next two years.

O HAI

Can’t Be Your Supermoon

Galleons, for those of you who are interested in astronomical events/follow Neil deGrasse Tyson on Twitter/have an astronomy calendar on your wall telling you about these things because, let’s face it, you’re a complete nerd… well, then you’ve probably heard that tonight is the appearance of 2012′s supermoon.

A supermoon sounds awesome, no? Like a shining, pock-marked god, he will rise slowly above the horizon, huge, proud, laughing at our screams as he causes tsunamis while werewolves howl in bloodlust. We tremble at the might of Supermoon in all his magnificent, terrifying glory.

Supermoon gonna fuck you up.

Okay, so the reality is far less ominous/impressive.

Much like planetary orbits, the moon’s orbit around the Earth is not a perfect circle (…will I ever be able to use that phrase again without having Magdalena start up in my head?). Roughly once a year, the orbit of the moon places it in its closest position to the Earth. As such, the moon is slightly larger in the night sky.

Now, the moon at perigee (the official term for when the moon is at its closest point to Earth) is not suddenly swallowing up the night sky. While it is a full 14% larger than your average full moon, you aren’t really going to notice a significant difference unless you have a bizarrely well-trained moon eye, or you compare images of the supermoon to an average moon, like this:

And remember, the moon’s perceived size in our night sky changes gradually throughout the course of the year as it moves through its elliptical orbit, so the above difference would be markedly less pronounced between the supermoon and the full moon of the month preceding it.

Basically, you aren’t going to notice a difference between tonight’s full moon and last month’s. Sorry.

Even the tides don’t give you much of a clue. While they are higher than normal, it’s only by a few measly centimeters. There’s not going to be any catastrophic tsunamis occurring as a result of the supermoon.

So tonight, when you look up at the sky, you might think briefly about the fact that this full moon is larger than all the others you see throughout the year. But you aren’t going to see a difference, dear galleons. In fact, there’s really nothing all that special about the moon tonight.

The public may romanticize this “event,” but the firm, logical voice of science has spoken.

Wanted: New Planet. Must Have No Current Stellar Ties, a Willingness to Lurk on the Outskirts of a System, and Possess Devilish Charm and Appeal

So imagine, if you will, a star. Just speeding through space, like stars do. Shades on, listening to its stellar iPod (…I feel there’s a music of the spheres joke in there somewhere, but it would take a sharper wit than mine to make it happen). You know, a typical cruise through the universe.

When lo, by the side of the hyperspace bypass (sorry, Arthur Dent), there’s a figure. Dark. Mysterious. The star is intrigued, so it offers the stranger a lift.

Galleons, that star has just picked up a space rogue.

No, not a sexy space rogue. A rogue planet.

How does a planet become a rogue? Well, as a star system is forming, the matter surrounding the star often interacts. This is usually the cause of craters and planet-shattering in world formation, but sometimes, when two planets interact, one can be tossed out of the system completely.

And then it goes rogue, roaming the star cluster alone, free from the pull of a mother star.

However, a rogue planet can be picked up by a passing star going the same direction and speed. Even when in a star system again, however, the rogue planet remains a little wonky. It hangs back from the other planets in an extremely far orbit, which is often tilted. It may even revolve backward, just to fuck with everyone.

Or, at least, that’s what we theorize. See, we’ve never seen one of these rogue planets in a star system. Or, at least, we can’t definitively say we have. Because interactions between planets within a star system can cause wide, irregular orbits, giving us a slew of imposters to wade through.

However, there is a piece of evidence that points to the idea that rogue planets can be picked up and tacked onto existing star systems. And that piece of evidence is a double-planet system.

Now, hold up. It isn’t what you think. This isn’t two planets orbiting a single star… this is two planets, sans star, orbiting each other. Two rogue planets who found each other and formed their own little binary system. Like a little interstellar romance.

This double-planet system is the prime bit of evidence pointing toward rogue planet capture. And, while it is poetically sweet and scientifically interesting… is this lone binary system the only method we have of determining whether rogue planets can be captured again?

Of course not. But, as mentioned previously, it is difficult to separate real captured rogues from imposters (though exhaustive research of many, many star systems could give us a greater understanding of how to distinguish the two). A great piece of evidence would be to find a planet in a far orbit around a low-mass star. The star’s disk couldn’t have been large enough to form a planet that far out, so that distant planet would basically have to be a captured rogue.

According to recent research, the capture of rogue planets could be more common than one would think. Assuming there are as many rogue planets as there are stars (highly likely), then 3-6% of the stars would pick up a rogue over time. It would still be a rare event, but perhaps not as rare as we once believed. Particularly in young star clusters, where stars and rogue planets would be crowded into a smaller area (making pick-up interactions more likely).

Who knows- maybe one day, our own star will pull in a loner drifting through space. Then Sol would be back up to nine planets and could feel less shitty about itself (it still hasn’t recovered from the HD 10180 situation).

Bigger Fish in the Cosmic Sea or Suck It, Sol, You Lose the Solar System Dick-Measuring Contest

Fun Space Fact #1: Though we’ve found many a solar system out there beyond the edges of our dear Sol, many other stars surrounded by a whirling skirt of planets, all these systems have had far fewer planets than our own.

Fun Space Fact #2: That isn’t the case anymore.

That’s right. Out there, circling a star oh-so-cleverly named HD 10180, there are nine planets. Which breaks the current solar system planet record, a record which previously belonged to our 8-planet system.

In fact, it was previously believed that the HD 10180 system had a mere seven planets, but thanks to re-evaluation by the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), it seems ol’ HD 10180 has two more little planets hanging out with it.

I guess HD 10180 is the most popular girl in school, and Sol is yesterday’s news. Too bad, baby.

HD 10180 is about 130 light years from us, which scientists say is “not within reach of foreseeable human space travel,” but hell, 1 light year isn’t within reach of foreseeable human space travel, so what’s another 129 light years, eh? Still, in terms of space distances, that’s really not that far away. A few interstellar blocks, as it were.

So, I guess it’s like that quiet, bookish girl with the glasses and the ponytail who lives down the street from the hot cheerleader (and probably used to be best friends with her when they were young, before social pressures forced them apart, because that’s how the world works in crappy teen films) suddenly discovered contacts and makeup and a new hairstyle and is now the hottest girl in the school. And everyone wants to be her prom date and poor Sol is left a bleach-blonde, sniveling wreck without the crown or the quarterback boyfriend.

Still, Sol can at least lift her tear-streaked face up and spit on HD 10180 and haughtily declare that at least she has a life-sustaining planet, unlike that suddenly attractive hussy. HD 10180 might sport two super-Earth planets, but both of them have orbits that place them much closer to their sun than our own Earth is, making those super-Earths too hot to sustain liquid water (and, likely, life as we know it). And despite the fact that these super-Earths are larger than our own little blue dot,  they are some of the smallest planets to be found outside our own solar system.

Which begs the question… if we were able to downgrade Pluto because it was too small to be considered a “real” planet, when the time comes and we manage interstellar travel and our own little Earth seems tiny and insignificant in size compared to all those giants out there, will we be able to so heartlessly slash its status? And if we can’t, will it be based solely on the sentimental ideas that its life-sustaining properties and the fact that it’s humanity’s homeworld give it some kind of… je ne sais quoi that places it above other little rocky worlds? And if we do that, are we being true to the objective reality painted by science?

If we could do it to Pluto, could we do it to us?

I’m just saying.

Apparently, Shepard Isn’t the Only One Scanning Those Carbon-rich Asteroids

Well, to be fair, we’re talking about meteorites today and not asteroids.

DEAL WITH IT.

Anyway, the idea that there is other life out there in the universe is a pretty tantalizing notion, one that teases us all, from conspiracy theorists to astrophysicists. With all of the galaxies with all of their star systems out there, it seems strange to not believe there could be some other form of “life” out there, going about its business.

But life on our own planet appears to have been a happy accident, a fortuitous combination of time and temperature and the infusion of the material building blocks of what would eventually become our world, teeming with life. The favored theory is that a meteorite carrying the requisite minerals and such that could provide the final link in the chain that is our origin plopped down in the ancient sea and BAM! Life happened (albeit not immediately… loses a bit of its gravitas when you explain that, though, doesn’t it?).

And recently, studies have shown that the creation of some of those required bits and bobs, amino acids (the building blocks of proteins which speed up chemical reactions and build essential structures like hair, skin, and nails), can occur in multiple ways.

Backing up for a second, a team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD has been studying carbon-rich meteorites for a while now. They’ve already found amino acids in some that were created by a low-temperature process called Strecker-cyanohydrin synthesis. Which makes sense.

See, high temperatures tend to destroy amino acids.

But nature finds a way, and the researchers were surprised to find a type of amino acid present that was formed in much higher temperature (200- 1000°F) reactions called Fischer-Tropsch-type (FTT) reactions.

What’s particularly interesting about FTT reactions is that, unlike the Strecker reactions, liquid water is not required for amino acid creation. In fact, FTT reactions could have been creating amino acids on these meteorites long before water formed on them or other planets by snagging the needed components (hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen, all common space gasses) right out of the air, so to speak.

While the FTT reactions produce fewer amino acids than the Strecker reactions, the idea that both are possible out there in spaceland is delicious to me, because it opens the door of plausible alien life a little wider. Having multiple ways that an essential building block of life can form makes it statistically more likely that more life does exist out there.

And don’t worry- these samples appear quite pristine, with the researchers citing the components and shape of the amino acid chains to be inconsistent with most amino acids that form naturally, as well as their careful study of the surrounding regions, which yielded extremely low amino acid counts, proving there was little terrestrial contamination. With these mostly pristine samples, we can safely believe that the majority of the amino acids found on the meteorites were formed in space.

The group plans to expand their research to include all groups of carbon-rich meteorites. While finding amino acids on these meteorites was considered a long-shot before, the scientists would now be more surprised to not find them.

I love this study. It’s not showy or anything, but it does build our ideas of how life could form both here and on other worlds, and it’s a tidy little example of how scientific discoveries can change how we view things, even if those things are simply amino acids on space rocks.

Zero Hour, Nine A.M.

It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did ~Rocket Man Elton John

We are apparently on a Mars kick this week, dear galleons. But I’m sure you don’t mind (and, if you do, you can always stop reading- choice, she is yours).

It’s every science fiction fan’s dream that some day the human race will colonize space. From many of the stories in Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man to the video game series Red Faction to one of the final Doctor Who episodes to feature the 10th Doctor, if you are any kind of nerd, you’ve probably encountered a story of what life on Mars will be like for humanity in the future. However, as we discussed a few days ago, travel to the red planet is still in that nebulous area called the future.

At least, it is for humans.

Yesterday, 10 of the toughest organisms on the planet were loaded into a container no bigger than a hockey puck, tucked into Russia’s Fobos-Grunt spacecraft, and blasted toward the Martian moon, Phobos. The Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE… get it?) is a project organized by the Planetary Society of Pasadena, California. The goal of the project is to study the effect of interstellar radiation and temperatures on living organisms without Earth’s protective magnetosphere, as well as test transpermia (the idea that organisms could be ejected off planets through impact, travel through space inside rocks, and be deposited on another world).

Which, if the organisms survive, would lend a small amount of credence to the theory that life on Earth could have started when a chunk of rock from another planet smashed into our planet’s surface.

Anyway, the 10 littlest astronauts have a three-year trip ahead of them. This is no mean feat, so we had to select just the right organisms for the job. Who was the most likely to survive? We needed the extremophiles, the badasses of the natural world. And we needed some variety- a few bacteria, some eukaryotes, some archaea.

Here are the 10 lucky organisms to make the cut:

• Bacillus safensis [bacteria]- this little guy was actually found in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility… so, there’s a chance he’s on Mars already *le gasp*
• Bacillus subtilis [bacteria]- two strains of this guy are going up, one of which is already a seasoned space traveler, having been to the moon and had multiyear exposure in a low Earth orbit
• Deinococcus radiodurans [bacteria]- this sucker can basically survive everything (cold, dehydration, vacuum, acid, radiation) and is the Guinness World Record holder for toughest bacterium
• Haloarcula marismortui [archaea]- a halophile
• Methanothermobacter wolfeii [archaea]- a methane producer
• Pyrococcus furiosus [archaea]- because this puppy thrives at temperatures of 100°C, it can be used as a maximum temperature indicator
• Saccharomyces cerevisiae [fungi]- a yeast, this guy is not only super useful (used for baking and brewing since ancient times), it’s also already proven its resiliency in space- it survived 553 days on an exterior panel of the ISS
• Arabidopsis thaliana [plantae]- this little guy is better known as the mouse-ear cress, a small flowering plant that is frequently used to understand the molecular biology of plant traits (he’s already been to the moon as well)
• Tardigrades [animalia]- known as water bears, these teensy microscopic guys look like a creepy cross between a pig and a caterpillar… they’ve also survived the vacuum and radiation of low Earth orbit

But all is not bright and shiny for LIFE. It’s faced some harsh criticism because many believe the project violates the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The Outer Space Treaty, for those of you who don’t know, is SPACE LAW. No joke. It is the entire framework for international space laws. And in Article IX, it is expressly stated that, “States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose.”

If LIFE were to malfunction and crash on either Phobos or Mars itself, these extremophiles have the possibility of surviving. And if the microbes escape, then you have potentially ruined any chance of studying the origin of organic matter found on Phobos (or Mars, depending on where the hypothetical crash occurred).

“It would be difficult to convince anyone that detected organics were not released from the spacecraft,” said Catharine Conley, NASA’s planetary protection officer¹.

Controversy or no, the project is on its way to Phobos now. In three years, we’ll discover just what (if anything) survived the journey.

Here’s looking at you, little astronauts. Godspeed.

1 The planetary protection officer position with NASA ensures that agency projects do not contaminate other solar system bodies with terrestrial life. It’s also probably the single most badass title in the world… I have found my new career goal.

Welcome Back, Mars-500

“We are literally 30 seconds away from Mars.”

Oh, Shannon Leto. I may love your music and think you are gorgeous (it’s the eyebrows… though I will admit that, true to form, I really swooned when he was rocking a beard and black leather jacket), but your grasp of science is tenuous at best.

Or maybe it’s just language that is tripping you up. You do know what the meaning of literally is, don’t you?

Because even light can’t travel that fast (and for Feynman’s sake, if you bring up those goddamn neutrinos, I’ll smack you). It would take light roughly 4 minutes or so to travel from the Earth to Mars. And people? Oh, that would take quite a bit longer.

Now, the United States supposedly has plans to get to Mars by the mid-2030s, according to the Obama administration’s space policy. However, after the cancellation of both the Shuttle program and the Constellation program… well, I admit that I remain skeptical. For the United States, I see the future of space travel being oriented more in the private sector. And frankly, I’m okay with that. The peak of space travel in the United States occurred in the mid-20th century, during the great space race with the Soviet Union. In a battle for technological supremacy/dominance, we pushed further and further, eventually landing humans on the goddamn moon.

Conspiracy theorists, you walk away right now. I have no time for your “it was all in a studio” shit.

But the United States lost interest. We started working with the Soviet Union instead of against them, and once we lost that sense of competition, we really lost the bulk of our drive to push the limits of space travel (a sense of competition that the private sector could recapture in force). The science community may have continued to send various probes and missions into space, but the public didn’t really care anymore. The missions became less daring, less attention-grabbing, and the space program faded from our minds. Regular space travel became the stuff of science fiction and dreams again, not the potential reality of the 60s and 70s.

But Russia… ah, Russia never gave up. Those tenacious bastards have kept their space program alive and kicking, pushing themselves even without the United States there to keep them on their toes. These are the same folks that ran Mir, the incredibly successful space station that orbited the Earth for 15 years, which was a successor to Salyut, the first Soviet space station program. They really paved the way for the ISS, which they are a huge part of, but if you think that’s all Russia’s been up to, oh boy, are you wrong.

See, Russia and the United States… the reason the whole space race happened is because the two nations are more alike than they care to admit. Neither of them want to be second place. They are both proud, fierce nations who want to be top dog. Where they do differ is in how that tends to manifest. The United States strikes quick and fast. We asserted our space dominance when we reached the moon. We strutted our stuff, but then we were done. Game over. But the Soviets didn’t see it that way. A nation with a much longer, richer history, they have patience the United States lacks. Did we really think they just gave up? That the game was over?

If so, we were dead wrong. The Soviet Union, later Russia… they just kept working at it. Building their space program, pushing harder. They never lost sight of their goal. Sure, the United States made it to the moon. Woop-dee-fucking-doo.

Russia is going to Mars.

***

A jaunt to the moon and back in a manned spacecraft takes about a week. It takes 74 weeks to travel to Mars and back. A rather sizable difference, to be sure. Therefore, it is going to take a hell of a lot more rigorous preparation to get humans to the red planet.

And it’s not just the technology that’s going to be tested and prepped- we have to test people, as well. 520 days in an isolated hunk of metal, with only a few other people for company… that’s something most space travelers haven’t had to deal with before (a marked exception being Valeri Polyakov, who had a 437-day spaceflight with Mir).

Thankfully, this is something we can study and prepare for. And Russia’s been busy doing just that (in collaboration with the European Space Agency). First, they had a 15-day stage. Then, a 105-day stage. And just yesterday, six individuals emerged from the first full-length, 520-day isolation experiment.

This, galleons, is Mars-500.

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The Mars-500 experiment facility is located at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow. This 72-square-metre faux spaceship features five different modules, though only three simulate the actual spacecraft (the habitat, utility, and medical modules). The other two simulate a Martian lander and the Martian surface.

I like that they felt the need to specifiy where all the toilets are.

So, on June 3, 2010, six men (selected from over 6000 applicants from 40 countries) entered the windowless facility:

• Commander Alexey Sergeyevich Sitev, Russian engineer
• Romain Charles, French engineer
• Sukhrob Rustamovich Kamolov), Russian surgeon
• Alexandr Egorovich Smoleevskiy, Russian physiologist
• Diego Urbina, Italian-Colombian engineer
• Wang Yue, Chinese instructor at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center

The experiment aimed to replicate a Mars mission as closely as possible, from long stretches of monotonous “space travel” to communication delays. It studied the effects of these stresses on the bodies and minds of the participants, as well as testing the methods of control, diagnostics, and general operation of equipment involved in such a mission, as well as simulating activity on the Martian surface.

Here’s a timeline of the mission:

That simulated landing was the biggest milestone of the trip. Three of the six crew members took the “landing craft” to the “planetary surface.” There were three separate jaunts onto the “planet,” which was really nothing more than a large domed room with sand and rocks on the floor. Still, the crew wore full spacesuits and even deployed a remote control rover (though the room couldn’t possibly prepare them for some of the particular oddities they might experience on the Martian surface). Then, they hopped back in their “landing craft” and rejoined the other half of the crew in the main vessel.

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But just how were our “spacefarers” being studied? Their immune systems, sleep cycles, hormone levels and other vitals were constantly monitored. They filled out questionnaires. Their faces were videotaped when they were working on the computer systems to be studied for signs of fatigue, stress, and depression.

Of course, the experiment couldn’t perfectly simulate a Mars mission. The crew didn’t have to deal with reduced gravity or the dangers of rocket launches, for example. However, it was the first time psychological information was obtained through the entirety of a “space mission.” Actual space missions have provided much more haphazard information. So, while it isn’t a perfect replication, the experiment should still give us some solid data, particularly regarding that troublesome isolation issue (data that could not only be used for future space travelers, but also to help soldiers dealing with stress and fatigue).

Crewmember Diego Urbina mused about the experience:

Now that it is coming to an end, I am still convinced that this was not a journey into the cosmos, but a journey to know ourselves and our minds, to realise how important respect and communication are in order to achieve a functional crew, how fundamental are the links to the real world, thin and fragile as they may be in this situation.

Naturally, the biggest issue on such a trip is boredom. Diary entries and Tweets from the crew showcase this, highlighting their almost childlike excitement over holidays. Like Halloween, where they all dressed up and decorated their living area. And Chinese New Year, where they all apparently acted like dorks (I think I am in love with all of them). And Christmas, where they all had their own “stocking” over a picture of a fireplace and a cardboard tree. As they admitted, it was less that they were really excited about the holiday and more that it was a break in the monotony of their daily routine.

Despite this, the crew performed remarkably well, and the mission was deemed a success. And after 17 months in the facility, the six crew members emerged yesterday, all smiles after their sojourn.

Again, while not a perfect Mars mission simulation, this experiment should certainly help with planning a Mars mission in the future. The next step in planning a Mars mission would be a trip into space. Perhaps with long layovers at the ISS to simulate flight time to Mars, with a walkabout on the moon filling in for a Mars landing. But this experiment gave us some vital information about how the crew will handle such a long space venture.

As Jennifer Ngo-Anh of the European Space Agency said, “We can prepare and improve the technology, but at the end it will be the human factor – the crew – who decide whether the mission will be a success.”

It’s this kind of active pursuit of the Mars goal that makes me sure that it’s going to be Russia (working with the ESA) that’s going to be sending the first manned mission to Mars. But you know what? I don’t care who gets there first- so long as we’re going.

Because we gotta get past Pluto, yo. I hear that’s where the Mass Relay is.