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Meta Research Bulletin ©2007
A
new spacecraft will be launched toward Mars this summer. The scheduled date is
August 3. The mission is known as “Phoenix”,
and consists mainly of a lander with the capability to dig, scoop, and drill,
then photograph and analyze soil and samples.
Our
first reaction, especially in light of the preceding articles, might be that we
will finally get some definitive answers about liquid water and life. But
sadly, that is not the case. At the official web site for Phoenix, http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/mission.php, we
learn that the probe will land in the northern arctic regions and its goal is
to answer three questions: (1) can the Martian arctic support
life, (2) what is the history of water at the landing site, and (3) how is the
Martian climate affected by polar dynamics?
However,
the “support life” question means the probe will determine if the chemical and
environmental conditions are such that life might have existed there billions
of years ago. The emphasis is really on climate change rather than life because
finding out whether ancient life could ever have existed is reserved for the
last of the planned missions in this series in the year 2016. No instrument
aboard this mission can detect present-day or even past life.
From
the CNN news story at http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/05/09/mars.probe.reut/, we
learn that scientists want to understand the environmental and climatic changes
that turned what is believed to have been a warm, watery world into the cold,
dry desert that exists today – assumptions that are wrong if the exploded
planet hypothesis is correct. The Phoenix
mission will add a microscopic perspective to the mix.
Upon reaching Mars in May
2008, the spacecraft is to land just as the winter ice begins to recede around
the polar cap. The probe should touch down on newly exposed soil, but their
true target lies just beneath the surface. This is where Phoenix’s scoop and drill come into play. Samples will be dissolved
in water to look for salts that likely would have been deposited during watery
conditions in the past. Phoenix's
onboard laboratory also includes small ovens to break down minerals in the samples for chemical analysis.
Some
scientists believe a vast frozen ocean is buried beneath the ice. Another
theory says Mars' polar ice solidified from atmospheric water vapor, not a
widespread ocean. Phoenix will be
able to make isotopic measurements of the hydrogen and oxygen molecules and
perhaps resolve this puzzle.
Phoenix is a resurrection of spare parts
and instruments from the unsuccessful Mars
Polar Lander and Mars Surveyor 2001
Lander initiatives. Polar Lander
was lost as it attempted to touch down in December 1999. Mars Surveyor was canceled in the wake of Polar Lander's failure and the loss of a sister probe, Mars Climate Orbiter, two months
earlier. NASA traced the failures to inadequate testing and oversights. A
metric conversion error led to the orbiter's demise, for example. Like Polar Lander and Climate Orbiter, Phoenix
is a relatively low-cost mission. Rather than building "faster, better,
cheaper" spacecraft, as had been NASA's aim in the 1990s, Phoenix achieves its savings by narrowly
focusing its science agenda to determine one goal: if Mars had the ingredients
for life.
And in
that simple goal statement, we have a succinct summary of the near-term future
of our space program – deliberate baby steps rather than breakthroughs in discovery
and understanding. In 1976, we were sending life-detection experiments to Mars,
and they came back with all-positive readings. Rather than following up, in
2007 we are sending “ingredients” detection experiments and studying climate
change. Apparently, the U.S. space program will not attempt to answer the big
questions for perhaps another decade or two! Fortunately, other countries are
not similarly demotivated.
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“There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear
energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be
shattered at will.” – Albert Einstein, 1932
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