The Challenge for NASA

Someone recently sent me a link to an interview with Robert Zubrin, where he discusses the financial value of an astronaut’s life. Zubrin points out that NASA is so risk averse it is essentially paralysed, which is a bit harsh and over simplistic, but I understand his point. For what it’s worth, I think NASA’s biggest challenge is the need for projects to transcend politics, as they require decades to come to pass. And NASA is such a behemoth, that it lacks the lean focus it had with Apollo.

When it comes to space travel, the problem with a risk averse culture is risk is subjective. I read an article that said the last shuttle had a 1 in 100 chance of ending in catastrophe. But this is not a crap shoot in Las Vegas, where every role of the dice is essentially the same, and so a random result can bring predictable outcomes over a long enough sequence. Just because two shuttles have been destroyed, didn’t mean the next launch was any more or any less likely to have a catastrophic failure, particularly as following those failures intense scrutiny was given not only to the cause of the failure but to all aspects of the mission. If anything, catastrophic failures drive down the odds of a repeat, because such scrutiny drives precision.

Rocket science is well understood. It’s a complex mix of interdependent systems, admittedly some of these have low tolerances and excessively dangerous consequences, but that’s just as true of air travel. The airlines have used the investigative model for decades to drive down accidents following air disasters. In the same way, the shuttle became safer rather than more risky over time.

The real problem for Columbia was not that NASA didn’t have enough risk averse managers at the time, it was that their aversion was selective. Foam strikes were so frequent they had become common place. What should have been alarming, that something as banal as Styrofoam could damage something as critical as the heat shield, should have demanded attention long before Columbia broke up. And this highlights the problem with a risk averse culture, it is based on hindsight not forward thinking.

It is over simplistic, though, to say risk aversion alone has stifled space exploration by NASA.

As much as I’d like to point the finger at bureaucracy, that’s not to blame either. The reality is, space is really, really big. The distances involved are astounding, beyond everyday recognition.

Consider this…

• Earth to ISS, the International Space Station, is 220 miles
• Earth to the Moon is 238,900 miles, which is over a 1000x as far as ISS
• Earth to Mars is 228 million miles, on average, which is almost a 1000x as far as the moon, and over a million times as far as ISS

Let’s put this in perspective… If a journey from Earth to Mars was scaled down to a flight from New York to Los Angeles, then…

• The International Space Station would orbit just beyond the curb outside your house
• The moon would orbit around New Brunswick, New Jersey, just outside of New York

As much as I’d like to get steamy-eyed about a mission to Mars, operating a manned mission at those distances is simply beyond our capability. Unless there is a paradigm shift in space travel, like the advent of a space elevator, we’re going to be stuck in and around this gravity well we call Earth for quite some time to come.

The astounding success of the Mars rovers hints at the role robotics should play in future exploration. Personally, I’d love nothing more than to see a science rover on Enceladus or Europa, looking for evidence of frozen microbial life in the overturned ice.

 

Mars has Cows

Surprisingly, it seems there is a very good possibility of life existing outside the Earth, but still within our solar system.

Mars has methane, which implies the presence of volcanic or tectonic out-gassing or microbial life. We know Mars has been geologically inactive for hundreds of millions if not billions of years, so that’s leaving the methane looking decidedly like an organic by-product. This is one of the things NASA’s Curiosity Rover is going to investigate when it lands on Mars in 2012.

Methane, or CH₄ as it’s known to its friends, is simple molecule, but it cannot survive in the Martian atmosphere for any significant length of time because…

• The lack of a planetary magnetic core leaves it vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation that breaks the molecule apart
• The lack of substantial gravity and lack of protection from solar wind, means the thin Martian atmosphere gets stripped off into space quite easily

It’s interesting to note that micro-organisms, on Earth, at least, produce methane through a simple process known as methanogenesis, an anaerobic reaction (that doesn’t require oxygen). It’s a reaction that’s perfectly suited to the red planet as the principle pathway required for this chemical reaction is carbon dioxide and the result is methane and water. With all three molecular suspects and one element present on Mars, there’s a good case to go looking for bugs.

CO₂ + 8 H⁺ + 8 e^- → CH₄ + 2 H₂O

Methane has also been detected on Titan, although this may be from geological activity.

Titan, on the other hand, has its own peculiar mysteries. Hydrogen, which is abundant in the upper atmosphere, is curiously absent lower down, which implies it has probably been absorbed by something, something that just might be alive.

If this bears out under more scrutiny, it would raise the fascinating prospect that there could be lifeforms using hydrogen as we use oxygen.

If Mars and Titan both have life, and I know it’s a big ask, but if they do, then we would have the remarkable prospect of living in a solar system that has three habitable environments and two, possibly three, distinctly different types of lifeforms. If that turns out to be the case, then the prospect of finding life elsewhere in the universe, and possibility of there being intelligent extraterrestrial life, would leap up exponentially.

Now, there’s plenty of other avenues for methane production to consider before the champagne corks get popped, but what a tantalising possibility. These are exciting times in which we live.

I’m intensely curious about what Curiosity will uncover on the red planet, aren’t you?

 

Dr. Evil Hijacks Martian Satellite

At first, it sounds like a plot from Austin Powers, with Dr. Evil surreptitiously plotting to take control of a satellite in orbit around Mars, but, that’s exactly what you can do with NASA’s HiRise satellite.

HiRise is currently in orbit around the red planet and has a resolution or 1/3 of a metre, or roughly the length of your forearm, which is significantly better than you currently get when you look at your house with Google Maps (1 metre resolution).

Now, here’s the clincher. The folks at NASA have decided to enlist us civilian scientists in a crowd-sourcing experiment, allowing us to propose targets for HiRise to photograph in detail. How cool is that? Yep, that’s right. You really can (kinda) take control of a satellite in orbit around a planet some 250 million miles away. Dr Evil would be proud.

HiWish is the crowd-sourcing site where you can review maps of Mars, look for curiosities, check out the sites others have proposed and review footage from previous runs. And if your proposed site is selected for photography, you’ll get an email with a link to the results.

I proposed looking at the edge of the Hellas impact crater in the southern regions of the planet and, in particular, focusing on the burst edge of what looks like a lake (that has now dried up). The “lake” has irregular walls rather than crater walls and there’s a broad run-off stretching down to the left, eroding the land as it falls away inside the Hellas basin. It seems to me that the lake wall appears to have burst and that might reveal some clues about Mars’ water past.

I must confess, I’m a bit skeptical about vast amounts of water existing for any length of time on Mars, simply because Martian gravity is so weak (it’s closer to the Moon’s than the Earth’s), and without an active molten core, Mars lacks a protective magnetosphere, which allows the Sun’s radiation to strip away its thin atmosphere, leaving the planet with such a low pressure atmosphere that water can barely exist in liquid form. But, that’s in the here and now, perhaps things were radically different in the past. Certainly the recent discoveries of ice water on Mars and the appearance of subterranean run off gives hope that there’s still some kind of watery brine below the surface.

If you pick out a spot on Mars for the HiRes to photograph, please tell me about what you chose and why (paste the link in your comment)

Update: Time Magazine has an interesting gallery of photos showing the evidence for water on Mars

 

Life on Mars

It’s somewhat ironic that, with all our efforts to find life on Mars, if there is life it may have originated from Earth.

There are currently 50,000+ catalogued meteorites, with roughly just a hundred thought to originated from Mars because of their composition, the ratio of trapped gases matching the Martian atmosphere, etc.

Some have even proposed that the Allan Hills meteorite contains fossilised Martian nanobacteria. As tantalising as that prospect is, and as convincing as the scanning electron microscopic images are, nanobacteria, itself, is controversial and unproven here on Earth (let alone Mars). To me, the images are quite convincing, as they really do appear organic in nature, but the beauty of peer-reviewed science is that it is not for me, a neophyte, to guess when there are peers equal to the task, already pouring over this subject.

But now, another alternative has emerged, and it’s one I considered as the subject of a novel a few years back (and should have jumped on it at the time), and that is that life may have been spread from Earth through out the solar system, being thrown up by large impacts like the Chicxulub impact.

Remarkably, computer models have been developed that show that…

• 0.02 per cent would reach the Moon
• 0.17 per cent would reach Venus
• 0.01 per cent would reach Mars
• 0.06 per cent would reach Jupiter
• 0.19 per cent would fall into the Sun
• and a staggering 6.75 per cent would reach the orbit of Pluto.

Now, you may wonder how so much can reach Pluto when so little reaches Mars and Jupiter, by comparison. The answer lies in understanding the gravity wells spread throughout the solar system (planets), with their complex paths following various Lagrange points and gravity-assisted boosts that run, like a highway, throughout space.

Achieving panspermia, with life reaching out from the Earth to other worlds, is actually quite probable, given how hardy bacteria are in a vacuum.

When Apollo 12 brought back a camera from Surveyor 3, the intention was to examine the prolonged effect of space vacuum and solar radiation on equipment. Little did they realise that, three years previous, a technician had inadvertently contaminated the camera casing with Streptococcus mitis. Much to everyone’s surprise, the bacteria could be revived.

So could bacteria from Earth, spread as the debris of a massive impact, survive for thousands or millions of years in space and be naturally revived on contact with liquids on Mars or Europa? Yes. In fact, we’ve already successfully revived yeast from the Eocene period, some 45 million years ago and made Jurassic beer (you’ve got to love science). So, as a concept, all the elements have been individually shown to be plausible.

If there is life on Mars, it may well have originated from Earth.

How would we tell? Actually, that would be quite easy. We’d recognise the DNA quite quickly and, by comparisons with the phylogenetic tree of life, would even be able to tell roughly when it split off and started an independent evolutionary branch, so we’d know roughly when it departed the Earth.

Ah… the mind boggles with possibilities…