The "Supermoon" of March 19, 2011 (right), compared to a rather "average" moon of December 20, 2010 (left): note the size difference. Images by Marco Langbroek.

You may have heard all the excitement last weekend about the so-called “supermoon”. The gist of it is that the moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular, so its distance from the earth varies slightly. When it is at the closest point in its orbit, it looks slightly larger (and therefore slightly brighter) in the sky. It’s not really a big deal, and all the talk of the SuperMoon got many astronomers worked up in much the same way we get worked up about the Mars Hoax or the 2012 doomsday.

But all the talk of the “SuperMoon” got me thinking and I realized that we were missing a teachable moment. No, the moon being at perihelion is not a big deal, but our Moon is pretty “super”. Let me show you why:

When you look at the mass of the largest moons in the solar system relative to their planets, our moon really stands out. In fact, most of the bars on this chart aren’t even visible because the moons are so tiny compared to their planets. To see them, we have to switch to a logarithmic scale (meaning each step on the vertical axis is 10 times larger than the previous step).

There, now we can at least see some of the other large moons. Phobos and Deimos are still off the chart because they are just tiny captured asteroids, dwarfed even by the relatively small mass of Mars. Likewise, other than Neptune’s giant moon Triton (which may actually be a captured Kuiper Belt object) its other moons are tiny.

Of course, our moon is physically smaller than the big moons in the outer solar system, but because the gas giants are so large, their moons are smaller in a relative sense. This difference points to a difference in how the moons formed. Whereas most of the big moons around the outer planets formed out of the accretion disks for their planets, our Moon formed when the proto-Earth was whacked by a giant impactor about the size of Mars, ripping off a huge chunk of material that ended up coalescing as our Moon.

So, out of all the planets, our moon is the largest relative to its planet. Of course, if Pluto was still counted as a planet, its moon Charon would hold that title. Charon is so big that the center of mass of the Pluto-Charon system is outside of Pluto, leading some people to call Pluto-Charon a “double planet”.

Now I’m looking forward to next year’s “super moon” so I can (a) tell them that the moon being a little closer isn’t that big a deal, and (b) I can tell them why we really do have a super moon.

Well, I survived Operational Readiness Test 8 (ORT)! Prior to this week, my only experience with rover operations was as payload downlink lead (PDL) for the color cameras on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER). I joined MER well into the extended mission, when all of the bugs had been worked out and the planning process was very efficient and streamlined.

My day as a Pancam PDL is pretty easy: take a look at the pictures that came down, check to make sure that the cameras are healthy and that we took pictures of the right things, write down the results of those checks in a short report, and then attend a ~45 minute telecon to tell the team what I just typed in my report. I never experienced the joys of the uplink side for MER.

For this ORT, among other roles I was the second-shift science Payload Uplink Lead (PUL) for ChemCam, which means that I finally got to experience the rest of the planning day that I always missed as a Pancam PDL. The uplink role is split into two shifts because it would be cruel and unusual punishment to make one person work from when the data comes down in the morning until the next day’s commands are sent up to the rover, late at night. Also, people working for that long would start to make mistakes, and we don’t want to damage the rover because someone needed a nap.

After the early meeting where the PDLs report on the data received, the science teams run off with the data and come up with a list of things that they want to do the next day. Then those requested activities are compiled into one big plan that inevitably would require way more power, time, or data volume than is available. So then comes the Science Operations Working Group (SOWG) meeting, where everyone crams into one room and we go through the list of proposed activities and figure out how to make things fit. Usually some observations have to be cut, or shortened. After the SOWG, the PULs for each instrument go off to make minor changed to the plan.

Once refinement is done, there are some smaller meetings, followed by the Activity Plan Approval Meeting. At APAM, we step through the plan line by line again, and make sure that everything is approved. At this point things are pretty much solidified and so we also review more accurate predictions of how much power, data, and time the plan will require. Once APAM is over, the first shift PULs leave and the second shift takes over to turn the plan into actual sequences, which are the actual sets of code that tell the rover what to do.

Once the sequences are written, the second shift PULs have to check to make sure that they do what is intended and don’t violate any “flight rules”. For example, ChemCam isn’t allowed to zap the rover, so we have to double-check the laser pointing. ChemCam actually has separate engineering and science PULs: the engineering PUL generally writes the sequences and the science PUL checks the pointing and makes sure that the laser will hit the right targets. The science PUL also has to check and make sure that the observations are “sun-safe”. ChemCam is a big telescope, and that means that if it is pointed too close to the sun while focused, it can damage the optics. Even when the telescope is defocused, it can’t point at the sun for more than a few minutes because it still heats up the optics too much. (You might be wondering why we would ever want to point at the sun: Sometimes it is necessary to point the cameras at the sun to make atmospheric measurements, and ChemCam points in the same direction as the other cameras on the mast.)

The PUL finished writing the sequences and then “delivers” them so that they can be combined into one big plan. There are two more meetings at the end of the day where the team once again steps through every sequence, and then through every line of code that is going to be uploaded to the rover. In case you couldn’t tell, we are really careful about what gets sent to the rover!

Phew!

Of course, the thing that makes all those tedious meetings worthwhile is the science, so let’s revisit that step of the process in more detail. The science team is split up into several “theme groups”, each of which takes a look at the data that was downlinked from the previous sol and comes up with a list of things to do. The theme groups are: geology (GEO), mineralogy (MIN), volatiles and isotope geochemistry (VIG), environment (ENV). I was the “keeper of the plan” for the MIN group twice this week, which means I got to put together the requested activities to be passed on to the SOWG meeting. The science theme group meetings tend to be a barely-controlled chaos of speculation and debate and bad science jokes and lots of meandering side conversations.

For this ORT, we were placed a few feet away from a really spectacular “outcrop” of rocks. This was actually a pile assembled by some folks at JPL, but they managed to get some really interesting chunks of rock to keep the scientists nice and busy. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m allowed to share images from the testbed rover, but I can give you similar examples. There was a big block full of pisolites, sort of like this:

There was also a light-toned rock with thin, darker layers that I am 99% sure came from the evaporite sequence that I visited during the Mars Sedimentology and Stratigraphy workshop a couple of years ago. In fact, I have photographic evidence that the lead engineer for the MSL drill took a bunch of rocks like this back to JPL.

There was also a nice slab with symmetric ripples on its upper surface:

And another that had some weird deformed ripples, sort of like this but much more dense and jumbled-looking:

And on and on it went. And then at the base of the outcrop was a patch of lighter-toned soil that was the target for our scooping activity on Friday. Of course, the science team had a field day trying to interpret this outcrop and patch of soil. In the afternoons while the PULs are going through some of their meetings, the science team gathers for the science discussion meeting, where people can give presentations about their latest hypotheses. On Saturday we had several fun presentations presenting hypotheses for how such a wide variety of rocks might end up in one place. One suggested that they were deposited as a debris flow from the crater rim. Another hypothesis suggested that the outcrop was “intelligently designed” to have pieces representative of the major rock types that you might expect if you had an alluvial fan deposit interfingering with lake sediments (something that is entirely possible for our landing site in Gale crater). Another presentation focused on the patch of salty soil and came to the conclusion that it is very geologically strange, and that it is almost like it was carried from elsewhere in some sort of container and dumped at its current location!

All of these got some laughs, but they also were great practice for the real mission. Someone brought up the very real and important point: what if we found a pile of disparate rocks like this one? Even though they are out of place, each rock has a fascinating story to tell. Would we spend months analyzing every single interesting thing in one jumbled up outcrop, when there is a 5 km high outcrop waiting for us in the form of Mount Sharp? How do we prioritize?

We also had the beginnings of some great discussions about what types of additional measurements would we want to make if we had more time at this outcrop? For example, APXS analysis showed that the light-toned soil that we scooped was high in sodium and chlorine (almost as if it were a pile of rock salt!), but there are minerals other than halite that have high Na and Cl and the APXS spot is large so it got a mix of materials. The scooped sample will also be a mix of the light-toned stuff and the surrounding dark gravel, but ChemCam would be able to analyze individual grains to get their composition.

Likewise, the chaotic arguments in the science theme groups were a great illustration of where some better organization might help make discussions during the primary mission more productive. We learned that sometimes it makes sense to combine certain theme groups when they have similar objectives, and that it is nice to have a Keeper of the Plan, but that people need to not crowd around them and stress them out.

The week was also riddled with minor and major problems that were lovingly referred to as “test-isms”. These ranged from bugs in the software that we were using, to getting permission to exceed our power budget so that all the instruments could get more practice, to the fact that some of the instruments (such as ChemCam) were getting fake data since they aren’t currently installed on the test-bed rover.

It has been a really exhausting week, and I can only imagine how hard it will be when we are on Mars and we have months and months of living on Mars time. But this week was also a great learning experience and an exciting taste of things to come. For all the “test-isms”, the team is really getting better at operating the phenomenally complicated machine that is on its way to Mars right now. It’s going to be a blast once we are on the surface and we have a real outcrop to argue about!

Image borrowed from io9's article on the announcement.

In another development that supports my suspicion that private enterprise is going to shape the future of space exploration, it looks like James Cameron, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and other influential wealthy nerds are unveiling a “new space venture” next week that is going by the name “Planetary Resources”.

Of course, the press release doesn’t give any details; they want speculation to run rampant this week. Given the name, a lot of people are thinking that the announcement will be some sort of asteroid or lunar mining operation. I would have thought that space-based solar power would be easier to tackle, but the name “Planetary Resources” sure suggests mining to me. Mining asteroids had been talked about since the early days of the space program. If you could capture a small metallic asteroid and safely return the metal to the earth, it would be worth trillions of dollars. And unlike ores on earth, asteroids have “native” metal in them, so they are much easier to process into a usable form. So if there are trillions of dollars of metal up there just waiting to be mined, why hasn’t it happened yet? Well, there’s the minor problem that getting into space is really expensive, so it takes quite an investment to get to the resources. Luckily, it looks like Planetary Resources is going to be able to make quite an investment to get off the ground.

Here is the full press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 18, 2012

*** Media Alert *** Media Alert *** Media Alert ***

Space Exploration Company to Expand Earth’s Resource Base

WHAT: Join visionary Peter H. Diamandis, M.D.; leading commercial space entrepreneurEric Anderson; former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki; and planetary scientist & veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones, Ph.D. on Tuesday, April 24 at 10:30 a.m. PDT in Seattle, or via webcast, as they unveil a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity’s prosperity.

Supported by an impressive investor and advisor group, including Google’s Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ph.D.; film maker & explorer James Cameron; Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect Charles Simonyi, Ph.D.; Founder of Sherpalo and Google Board of Directors founding member K. Ram Shriram; and Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group Ross Perot, Jr., the company will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources’.

The news conference will be held at the Museum of Flight in Seattle on Tuesday, April 24 at 10:30 a.m. PDT and available online via webcast.

WHEN: Tuesday, April 24

10:30 a.m. PDT

WHO: Charles Simonyi, Ph.D., Space Tourist, Planetary Resources, Inc. Investor

Eric Anderson, Co-Founder & Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources, Inc.

Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Co-Founder & Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources, Inc.

Chris Lewicki, President & Chief Engineer, Planetary Resources, Inc.

Tom Jones, Ph.D., Planetary Scientist, Veteran NASA Astronaut & Planetary Resources, Inc. Advisor

WHERE: Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at The Museum of Flight

9404 East Marginal Way South

Seattle, WA 98108

Event will also be streamed online.

ORTs are dress rehearsals for the actual mission. Everyone is given a part to play and we spend a week or so simulating rover operations as completely as possible. It is during ORTs that the team really learns to work together, rapidly interpreting data from the rover and planning the next sol’s activities (a sol is a martian day). As you might guess from the number, there have been multiple ORTs before this, mostly focused on specific aspects of the landing and the first few days of operations while everything is still being tested. ORT8 is different because it is going to be a simulation of normal surface operations. The goal will be to scout out some nearby rocks, select one for more detailed analysis, and then start positioning the robotic arm to make measurements.

MSL's twin in the rover testbed.

Since our actual rover is currently hurtling through space on its way to Mars, we will be using  a duplicate that lives in the testbed at JPL. But for our purposes, it might as well be on Mars. We will be simulating a specific set of sols well into the mission, and all communications with the testbed rover will be timed to match periods during those sols when the Mars orbiters will be available to relay information between the rover and Earth. Even the delay for the radio signals to travel between Earth and Mars is included in the test.

And yes, we will be working on “Mars time”. Our schedules will be set by the rotational period of Mars, which has a day that is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. This means that each day we will start working a little bit later. For a week-long training session, this isn’t too bad, but during primary operations, when the team will be working on Mars time for 90 sols, it will lead to keeping some very strange hours. The orbital passes make things even more complicated, so instead of a nice 40 minute increment each day, the times jump around a bit depending upon when we can communicate with Mars.

To prepare for the ORT, we have “flight schools” for a couple of weeks beforehand. These are teleconferences where the folks at JPL educate all of us scientists and newbies about everything from where to find food at JPL to the intricacies of planning complicated rover measurements. There is a whole bevy of software and websites that we need to learn how to use to make operations run smoothly, and these telecons introduce us so that we aren’t completely in the dark when we arrive at JPL.

Each instrument team also has to develop its own software to analyze their data, and work out step-by-step procedures for each of the roles. Since landing is still a few months away, these ORTs provide a chance to test the software and procedures and learn what works (and what doesn’t) so that things can be improved for the real thing.

A photo of the MER science operations working group (SOWG) room at JPL. The same room will be used for MSL.

I have some experience as a Pancam Payload Downlink Lead (PDL) on Spirit and Opportunity, but for this mission, I have been assigned multiple roles with more responsibility. I will be serving three roles during this week’s ORT. I will be the “mini-Keeper-of-the-Plan” (miniKOP) for the mineralogy science theme group (MIN STG), and the ChemCam Payload Uplink Lead (PUL) and Payload Downlink Lead (PDL). (In case you weren’t already aware, NASA runs on acronyms. Part of the filght schools includes a webpage that serves as a cheat-sheet for the hundreds of acronyms that we use.)

The miniKOP is a newly invented role, based on experience from previous ORTs. The idea is that each science theme group has discussions and comes up with a rough idea of the sorts of observations that they would like the rover to make. The miniKOP uses planning software to keep track of the group’s plans so that they can then be shared with the rest of the team. In the past, this was the job of the science theme group lead (STL) but it is hard enough to lead the discussion, let alone deal with entering everything into the software. Thus, the miniKOP position was created.

PULs are the ones who listen to what the team wants and then translates that into sequences of commands to be sent to the rover. It’s a big job that takes all day, and there will actually be two PULs per sol for each instrument. One for the first shift and one who takes over for the second shift. For ChemCam, the job is broken down further, and there is an engineering PUL and a science PUL.

PDLs are the other side of the coin. The PDL is the person who looks at the data as it is downlinked from the rover, makes sure that everything went according to plan, and makes the preliminary science interpretations to share with the team.

To train for each role, you typically first are a “shadow” for that role. So, for example, on Tuesday I am shadowing the ChemCam science PUL2, following them around all day and learning how to do everything.

It promises to be a stressful and exhausting week, but there is no better way to learn something than to do it. There are a handful of other ORTs spread throughout the summer, so that by the time MSL touches down in Gale crater and gives us our first glimpse of Mt. Sharp beckoning in the distance, we will be ready to rove.

Team members react to the first images from the Spirit rover. Hopefully we'll see a similar scene in August!

MOLA topography overlaid on the THEMIS daytime infrared mosaic. The view is centered on Huygens Crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. (Click to embiggen. Note all of the valley networks in the embiggened version. Contact me if you want an even higher-res version!)

Actually, I can’t really take much credit. I am starting up a new project using ArcGIS*, and I got this pretty picture by just downloading the global topography and daytime infrared datasets from this USGS page. It’s extremely gratifying to download datasets and have them just automatically be aligned and map projected properly. I spent a lot of time today just zooming around Mars and admiring the beautiful data.

Of course, then I stumbled across this article begging NASA scientists to stop using rainbow color scales. But I don’t care what they say, none of the other color scales look right. I guess this blue-red scale is alright, and certainly more friendly for color-blind viewers:

*When I finished my Gale crater project a couple years ago I swore to never use ArcGIS again. It has a steep learning curve and many, many idiosyncrasies, and in my experience, it is prone to crashing. But it’s also very powerful and commonly used, which means that there is a lot of support for it and add-ins available. Plus, now that I work for the USGS, I have direct access to some ArcGIS whizzes who are helping me deal with the tricky aspects of the program. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be ready to swear off of it again at the end of this new project…

The first was by Jeff Andrews-Hanna, about the latest results from his groundwater modeling. You can read the abstract here. For years, Andrews-Hanna has been developing global models of groundwater activity on Mars and using them to explain some of the geologic features that we see. At this meeting, he presented the result of adding a “realistic” climate model to predict where it would rain on early Mars, rather than just assuming a uniform distribution of rain in the mid latitudes. I put “realistic” in quotes because the climate model that he used was developed for Earth and essentially treats Mars as though it is the Earth minus oceans, with Mars topography. Maybe early Mars was not as warm and wet as this model assumes, but it does give some interesting results.

Sediment thickness predicted by Andrews-Hanna's model. Meridiani is outlined and Gale crater is marked with a "G".

By predicting where rain would fall on Early Mars, Andrews-Hanna was then able to simulate how that precipitation would make its way into the groundwater table and then upwell in low-lying areas. These areas of groundwater upwelling would be places where sediment would accumulate and be cemented by the salts in the groundwater, forming sedimentary sequences. Lo and behold, this model predicts large sequences of sediment to be deposited in Arabia Terra, Meridiani, and in Gale Crater! The Arabia deposits are consistend with the remnants of eroded sedimentary outcrops seen from orbit, and at Meridiani the evidence from the Opportunity rover suggests that the rocks are sandstones cemented by sulfates, likely the result of groundwater upwelling.

As for Gale crater, the lower unit of the mound is a couple of kilometers high, which is about the thickness of the sediment predicted by Andrews-Hanna’s model. As the crater filled in, the amount of groundwater upwelling would have decreased, providing a natural limit on how thick the deposit could be. The upper portion of the mound looks geomorphically and mineralogically different, and could have been deposited later through some other process.

The second talk that I found particularly interesting was by Itay Halevy, and it expanded on some of the ideas discussed by Jim Head in his Masursky lecture. I met Itay at the Agouron field trip last summer and am always impressed by his work, which combines climate modeling, chemistry and geology. Itay pointed out that more than 30 percent of the martian surface is covered in lava flows that formed in the late Noachian to early Hesperian, which implies a whole lof of volcanic outgassing associated with such huge eruptions. Even for the relatively small columbia river flood basalt on Earth, the amount of outgassing was enormous: ~450 times as much as what was released in the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.

There has been some debate among martian climate experts over whether the sulfur dioxide gas produced by volcanic eruptions would cause warming (SO2 is known to be a greenhouse gas), or whether it would rapidly turn into aerosol paricles of sulfuric acid, which can cause cooling. The key is the timescales: the warming from release of SO2 would start immediately, while it would take a while for the aerosols to form, so for short-lived eruptions, there would just be a spike of warming. For longer eruptions, the warming would eventually be overpowered by the aerosol cooling, and the planet would cool. In either case, the warming period would last at most a few hundred years before the planet returned to its normal cold, icy state.

Itay suggested that the presence of sulfates in younger rocks than the phyllosilicates in most places on Mars is not because sulfates weren’t produced earlier on. He argued that it is just that the earlier sulfate deposits were eroded in subsequent phases of warming and melting, so we only see those deposits that came late enough that they weren’t eroded away.

The real take-away from Itay’s talk (and Jim Head’s lecture) was that early Mars could have been cold most of the time, with sporadic periods of volcanic activity leading to brief periods of warming and melting.

I thought Jim’s talk was a great summary of the state of our understanding of the evolution of the climate on Mars, and I will do my best to summarize it here. He started with our observations of recent Mars and worked his way back through the three major geological time periods, from the Amazonian (0 to 3 billion years ago) to the Hesperian (3 to 3.7 billion years ago) to the Noachian (pre-3.7 billion years ago).

For the Amazonian period, he emphasized the effects of the planet’s tilt (obliquity) on the distribution of ice. In short, when Mars is tilted more, the ice migrates from the poles to lower latitudes. And, based on orbital dynamics, we think that Mars is currently at an unusually low tilt. Unlike the Earth, which has a nice big moon to stabilize its tilt, Mars behaves chaotically, with large changes in obliquity.

Head also showed that even though the tilt of Mars is chaotic, observations can help to constrain which of the myriad paths of orbital evolution the planet took going back 3 billion years to the early Amazonian. By counting craters on ice-related features such as pedestal craters and lobate debris aprons (thought to be glaciers of some sort), you can get their approximate age and infer what the average obliquity was at that time.

The evidence points to a very cold and dry Amazonian period with ice movement controlled by the plant’s tilt.

When Mars is tilted by ~35 degrees, ice can migrate down to lower latitudes.

So, what about the Hesperian? In this time period, the massive outflow channels that scar the planet formed when huge amounts of water were catastrophically released. Despite all this water, however, Head cited some papers that showed that the instead of forming an ocean, you just freeze the water and then sublimate the ice.

The other major feature of the Hesperian that Head talked about was the “Hesperian ridged plains” which are thought to be huge floods of basaltic lava that formed early in the Hesperian. Flood basalts on earth can form very rapidly, producing huge amounts of gas and ash. One of the major points was that these were very large, discrete events. As Head said: “You can’t take the average of this over a long period of time and have a realistic view of what’s going on.” The sulfur dioxide released from these eruptions initially acts as a greenhouse gas, warming the planet by up to 25 degrees, but then gradually the SO2 gets turned into aerosols, which cause global cooling. So the result of the sudden warming and then cooling is a few hundred years of unusually warm temperatures.

Head suggested a somewhat unorthodox explanation for the sulfates seen at Meridiani, where instead of forming by groundwater upwelling, they are deposited when the water from one of these brief warm periods gradually evaporates.

Flood basalts on Earth.

In the Noachian, of course, the presence of valley networks, possible lakes, and clay minerals (which form in the presence of lots of water) are all important constraints on what the climate was like. But Head points to a recent paper suggesting that many of the phyllosilicate deposits are likely hydrothermal and didn’t form at the surface. Head also pointed out that there are huge polar deposits that are Noachian-aged, which is confusing if the Noachian was warm and wet.

Recent climate models show that for early Mars with a thicker atmosphere, you don’t get temperatures above freezing, but you get colder temperatures at high altitudes (just like on Earth) so you end up with ice collecting in the southern highlands, right where the Noachian-aged polar deposits are.

So how does Head explain the valley networks in the Noachian? Well, remember those brief warm periods caused by sudden volcanic outgassing? Those might provide all the melting necessary. In Head’s words, “punctuated volcanism leads to punctuated climate change”.

This a picture of Mars with no long-lived warm conditions or large oceans, making it disappointing for those who want to believe that Mars was once a nice place. I’m sure many people will argue against this hypothesis of a cold planet with brief volcanic warm periods, and as Jim Head says at the end of his talk, that’s a good thing. This hypothesis should be tested, and Jim advocated that everyone contact their representatives to make sure that the NASA budget supports continued missions to help test it.

The martian valley networks might be the result of brief warm periods melting the high-elevation ice, rather than rain from a northern ocean as suggested in this image from Luo and Stepinski (2009).

I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t answer very well. I was all prepared for my research methods and results to be picked apart, and so I went sort of brain-dead when this question came up. I managed to basically repeat the mission objective of assessing habitability and then my adviser came to my rescue by referring to this blog, where I have talked before about the reasons for space exploration.

My failure to answer well has bothered me ever since, and now, with the brutal cuts to the planetary science budget in the president’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2013, I think it’s time I gave a proper answer.

So, why explore Mars?

We don’t explore Mars to provide jobs. And yet, most of the money spent on missions to Mars, including MSL, goes toward paying the thousands of people who are involved in making a cutting-edge rover a reality. Everyone from the lead scientists to the rover drivers to the person who soldered the circuit boards has a family to feed and bills to pay. That’s where the money goes.

We don’t explore Mars so that we can develop spinoff technologies. But the same technique used by ChemCam to analyze rocks and soils from a distance — laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy — is also used to analyze everything from artwork to nuclear waste to food products to iron ore, and the advances in data analysis for Mars exploration are improving the method’s utility here on Earth. The CheMin x-ray diffraction instrument on MSL will be used to probe the crystal structure of rock samples, but commercial versions are also available. By making the instrument extremely compact and energy efficient, it can be taken to remote locations, where it is being used to identify counterfeit malaria drugs and save lives.

The field-portable version of CheMin (in the orange suitcase) can be used to analyze samples in the field, whether they are volcanic ash or malaria drugs.

We don’t explore Mars to improve our diplomatic ties, but we can’t do it without the help of other countries. Half of the ChemCam team is French, and they built the half of the instrument on the mast. The Sample Analysis at Mars instrument also is partially developed by French team members. The alpha particle x-ray spectrometer (APXS) is being built by the same Canadian aerospace company that built the Canadarm on the international space station. The Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) is partially funded and developed by the German Space Agency, and the rover environmental monitoring station, which will provide daily weather reports from Mars, is being provided by Spain. The Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument, which will probe the subsurface and search for buried ice, is being provided by the Russian Federal Space Agency.

Unfortunately, with the proposed budget cuts to Mars exploration, NASA had to cancel its involvement in a joint European/American rover that was being planned for 2016 or 2018. That mission is proceeding as a partnership between Europe and Russia.

We don’t explore Mars to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, but nothing captures people’s imaginations like space exploration. MSL is a nuclear-powered rover the size of a small car that will autonomously land with unbelievable precision on the surface of Mars by using a jetpack, and then start zapping the rocks with a laser beam. This mission sounds like science fiction but it’s even better because it is real. NASA shows what humans can do when they put their minds to something. If we want a new generation of scientists and engineers to solve the problems that we face here at home, then we need high-profile technical achievements like missions to Mars to inspire them and show that anything is possible.

So, if thousands of jobs, money- and life-saving spinoff technologies, strong diplomatic ties with other countries, and inspiring a new generation of scientists and engineers are all just side effects, then why do we explore Mars?

We explore Mars because we are human, and to be human is to ask questions. There’s a reason the rover is named Curiosity! There are thousands of questions that make up the bread and butter of our scientific investigations: why does that crater have a mountain of layered rocks in it? How did those minerals form? Why did the climate on Mars change? How did the planets form?

But there is one fundamental question that underlies Mars exploration: Are we alone in the universe?

We live on a planet that is overrun with life and we look up at the night sky and wonder if there is anywhere else in the universe that is alive. Mars, our next-door neighbor, is tantalizingly similar to the earth in many ways, and so we want to know if life ever arose there. Were the conditions ever right? And if so, what happened? Did life arise and die out, leaving telltale signatures in the ancient rocks, or did life miss its chance on Mars? Is it difficult for life to arise if the conditions are just right, or is it commonplace?

If we can understand what Mars used to be like, then we can say whether life ever had a chance. If we find that life had the chance but never got started, then we learn that the universe is likely a lonely place, with only the rarest special places like the Earth getting lucky enough to support living things. If we find that life arose quickly on early Mars, then we learn that wherever the conditions are right, life is inevitable: the universe wants to be alive. Then we can look to the icy oceans of the outer solar system, and the thousands of planets that we are discovering around other stars, and know that the cosmos is teeming with life.

We embark on big scientific endavors — exploring Mars, and colliding particles, and sequencing the genome, and peering back into the depths of time — because we want to answer the big questions. Every small step toward those answers is worth the investment, just for the knowledge gained. But even as we pursue the lofty ideals of pure science, the benefits of the pursuit are apparent in more concrete terms.

I often hear the criticism that we shouldn’t spend money on NASA, we should spend it on making things better here on Earth. I reject that false choice. As a great nation we can do both. And besides, last time I checked, NASA is on Earth. The people who work on space exploration are here on Earth. The new technologies that save lives and spur new industries are here on Earth. The diplomatic ties that we build are with other nations are here on earth. The child who is inspired to study science and technology and change the world is here, on Earth.

Spending money on space exploration does make things better here on earth, even as it answers our most fundamental questions about the universe.

That is why it’s worth it to explore Mars.

This is by no means the first time that a giant sand worm dust devil has been seen on Mars. Here are some more spectacular images:

A spectacular time lapse view of dust-devils from the Spirit Rover.

And of course, dust devil tracks on Mars are famous for their Jackson-Pollack-like designs:

Now that I have graduated, Yervant Terzian (the chair of NY Space Grant) invited me to come to the meeting and give a talk. That was pretty cool, but what really made me decide to attend the meeting was that he also invited me to join him and Erica Miles (the assistant director of NY Space Grant) in meeting with congressional staff on the Hill to lobby for Space Grant.

I am pretty interested in politics and I had always sort of wanted to talk to people on the hill about space-related issues, but I could never justify making a trip to DC. But here I had the perfect excuse! So of course I accepted the invitation, and last week I found myself touching down at Reagan National Airport, with a view of the Capitol and the Washington Monument out the window of the plane.

The next morning I put on a suit (a rare occurrence!) and met up with Yervant and Erica at breakfast. We ate in the conference room, while the director of the Space Grant association spoke to all of the people in the room about Space Grant’s budget and what our message should be on the hill. It was pretty simple: Space Grant suffered from a huge cut in Obama’s FY13 budget, even though Congress authorized its funding to continue at a higher level. Our job was to go talk to congress and ask them to keep the budget at the authorized level, and also to include language specifying how funds are to be divvied up among the states. (Without the language, NASA gets to do whatever it wants with the money, which causes tons of headaches and delays)

Once we had our marching orders, we took a taxi to the House office building, where we met up with Karen Loparco (Cornell’s lobbyist). Karen had our day all planned out, with up-to-the minute changes as various congressional staffers called her to cancel or confirm or reschedule. Without further ado, we hopped in the elevator and headed upstairs.

The call them the “Halls of Congress” for good reason. The halls in the congressional office buildings are huge, and each office is flanked by several flags (typically the US flag and the state flag) along with a plaque identifying the representative and their state.

I'm glad congress spends its time on specifying what type of disposable dishes to use in its cafeterias.