Researchers at Imperial College London have just begun a 5-year project to design and build tiny earthquake measuring devices to go to Mars on the 2007 NetLander mission. Unlike the instruments on next year’s European Mars Express/Beagle II mission, the Marsquake sensors will be the first to look deep inside the planet. The internal structure of Mars is a key to understanding some fundamental questions about the planet including whether life ever existed there. The sensors are capable of detecting liquid water reservoirs hidden below the surface, where life could possibly survive on Mars today. The recent discovery by the Mars Odyssey orbiter of large amounts of ice at the poles opens up the possibility of liquid water existing in the warmer conditions underground near the Martian equator. Dr. Tom Pike is designing the heart of the sensor, a two-centimeter square of silicon. “We’re micromachining a near-perfect spring and weight from a single piece of silicon. We’ll be able to detect the weight shuddering in response to a Marsquake from anywhere on the planet,” he said.
Quake Detectors to Help Search for Life on Mars
British scientists started building tiny ‘Marsquake’ sensors on Thursday that will be able to detect underground water supplies and could help in the search for life on the red planet. The 2007 NetLander mission will land four sets of instruments near the Martian equator to examine the planet’s weather and geological structure. The quake sensors will be the first to look deep inside the planet, the team responsible for their construction said. “We will look at how the vibrations from Marsquakes travel through the planet and work out what is going on deep inside,” said Imperial College London researcher Dr. Tom Pike. “If these vibrations hit liquid water under the landing sites, we should see a distinctive signature,” he added. “That is when the search for life on Mars will move underground.”
Canada wants in on Mars mission National Post
The Canadian Space Agency is angling for a chance to fly to Mars with a groundbreaking U.S. mission in 2007, and is using work on an innovative planetary landing system to try to impress NASA scientists. Canada’s contribution could also include robotic mining equipment designed to delve below the Martian surface for the first time and dig up a wealth of information on the mysterious red planet. If the agency’s role gets a green light from NASA and budget chiefs in Ottawa, it will probably cost Canada in the hundreds of millions of dollars, an agency official said yesterday. “Mars is one of those subjects that really catches people’s interest and it could be a tremendous education and outreach opportunity … especially for young people,” said Alain Berinstain, the organization’s Mars lead.
NASA Selects 10 Investigations for 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
NASA today announced the selection of 10 scientific investigations as part of the 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. The 2005 mission will carry six primary instruments that will greatly enhance the search for evidence of water, take images of objects about the size of a beach ball, and search for future landing sites on the martian surface. The investigations selected include two principal investigator instrument investigations and eight facility team leader or member investigations.
Building a Better Spacecraft
With the selection of Lockheed Martin to build the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), NASA is one step nearer to getting a closer look at the Red Planet, but according to the project’s program manager, Kevin McNeill, the spacecraft’s builders face a wide variety of technical challenges. Lockheed Martin was given the green light Wednesday to construct the MRO, to be launched in August 2005. The craft is to return the highest resolution images of the Martian surface ever taken by Mars-circling orbiters. Objects as small as the size of beach balls will be resolved through the lens of the orbiter’s camera system, said Jim Graf, the MRO project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. JPL will manage the mission that will operate for five-and-a-half years.
Jeffco plant to build Mars orbiter Denver Post
NASA has selected Lockheed Martin Astronautics to design and build the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at its south Jefferson County facility. The highly complex orbiter, which will measure Martian landscape features as small as 8 to 12 inches across, is twice the mass and will return 12 times the amount of data as the Mars Global Surveyor, now in orbit. The Global Surveyor, which also was built by Lockheed, has returned more than 101,000 images in its four years of mapping the Martian surface in 1-meter detail. Lockheed’s $145 million contract for the 2005 orbiter will cover development through operations. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is Lockheed’s partner in the mission.
NASA Picks Lockheed Martin to Build 2005 Mars Craft
NASA selected today the builder of a Mars orbiter equipped to snap super-close-up pictures of the red planet
Scientists to test Mars water-seekers in Egyptian desert AEDT
Cairo has given the go-ahead for French-based scientists to use the Egyptian desert to test sophisticated water-seeking probes before blasting them into space in the race to find water on Mars. “After laboratory work, we now want to study the performance of our prototypes on terrain which matches the surface of Mars as closely as possible,” said Egyptian astronomer Essam Heggy, involved in the project. The Netlander system, composed of four land-penetrating radars, will be put to the test in the Western Desert near Siwa in February 2002, ahead of plans to send it to Mars in 2007 on board an Ariane-5 rocket.
Zooming In On Mars: The Road to Human Missions
Putting a zoom lens on the Red Planet is the camera-toting task for NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Slated for Earth departure in August 2005, the Mars-circling MRO will snap super-detailed portraits of the Martian landscape. MRO’s powerful imaging system can help identify safe and scientifically rewarding landing sites for future robotic craft, as well as human expeditions. Reconnaissance imagery from the orbiter will be a factor of five over what the current Mars Global Surveyor camera cranks out, says the mission’s Project Scientist Richard Zurek.
A Canadian Martian Scientific Wish List SpaceRef.com
Participants at the 3rd Canadian Space Exploration Workshop (CSEW) had the happy task on Saturday of putting together a wish list of scientific objectives for a Canadian program of Mars exploration. On Friday night, Canadian Space Agency Executive Vice President Marc Garneau had surprised the space sciences community by announcing his intention to see Canada become a major player in the international Mars research scene. Calling on researchers to be bold and to ‘think big,’ Garneau made his announcements on the 40th anniversary of US President John F. Kennedy’s famous ‘put a man on the moon’ speech. The announcement also came with the promise of funding that will be “an order of magnitude greater” than what exists currently, putting the budget in the hundreds of millions range.