ALERT: RUSSIA PROPOSES MARS MISSION BY 2015 From Pravda: MOSCOW - The project of a manned flight to Mars is being developed in Russia together with American specialists. Preparation for the flight including construction of the spacecraft and the flight itself will require expenditures in the amount of approximately US$20 billion, one third of which will be financed by Russia. The scientists indicated that the development of the first stage of the project "was reliably financed by American and Russian authorities." PROJECT OF A MANNED FLIGHT TO MARS IS BEING DEVELOPED IN RUSSIA TOGETHER WITH AMERICAN SPECIALISTS (Pravda) Russia Proposes Sending Team to Mars (AP) Russian Space Agency Proposes An International Project To Put Human Explorers On Mars Many Russian Inventions To Be Used In Developing Project Of First-Ever Manned Expedition To Mars (EIN - subscription required) Mars Odyssey Successfully Deploys Science Mast 2001 Mars Odyssey (courtesy NASA/JPL/Caltech) June 4 - The Mars Odyssey spacecraft has achieved a significant milestone -- it has successfully deployed its long mast containing the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer. This important instrument will assist Odyssey in its continuing comprehensive search for elements and water on Mars. Mars Odyssey has been in orbit of Mars since October 2001 and will continue its primary mapping mission over the next two years. Assuming the probe stays in good health, the primary mission will be followed by an extended tour to assist communications between Earth and future missions on the surface. See the latest images [THEMIS website - NASA/JPL/Arizona State] Near-Surface Water Ice Found on Mars May 27 - NASA and the 2001 Mars Odyssey scientists have uncovered conclusive evidence of water ice on Mars, just below the surface in large patches all over the planet. The findings will be reported in the journal Science on Thursday, May 30 and announced in a press conference the same day. Odyssey reached Mars on October 23 last year and acheived a stable mapping orbit last month. Stay tuned to MarsNews.com for the latest on this important mission, and visit the official mission website at JPL.

MARS NewsWire: Latest News from the Internet Maintained by Dustin Green, News Editor

Friday, August 23, 2002 "Marsoweb" Site Developed for Future Mars Exploration (Cosmiverse.com) “Marsoweb,” an interactive Web site developed by NASA, is helping scientists select suitable landing sites for future missions to Mars. Scientists preparing for NASA’s next Mars mission, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers scheduled for launch in June and July 2003, are able to view more than 44,000 high-resolution images of Mars collected by the Mars Global Surveyor. Some show detail at less than three meters per pixel. These images are registered with context images and maps of thermal properties, rock abundance, slope roughness and geology acquired by the Viking and Global Surveyor orbiters and with altimeter and mineralogical data returned by Global Surveyor, which is still operating at Mars. The Web site provides scientists with special software tools to facilitate their interpretation of the data. Where to land on Mars A Nasa website for scientists to help them chose potential landing sites on Mars is becoming a great hit with the public as well. Scientists preparing for Nasa's next Mars mission, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers scheduled for launch in June and July 2003, have created Marsoweb to enable them to view more than 44,000 high-resolution images of the red planet. Mars provides a wealth of exciting landing sites, but most of them present surface hazards to the current generation of landers. The images combine all the available data about the surface of Mars allowing researchers to fly through its canyons and valleys or over its volcanoes and desert dunes. Russia Builds Mars Probe (Pravda) Russian space engineers have begun the construction of a space probe which will be sent to Phobos, one of the Moons surrounding the Planet Mars, in 2007. The engineers, working for the specialist company Lavotchkin, have finished the building of a model in Kaluga, south of Moscow, for a probe which will be sent to Phobos. CanaDrill could go to Mars (Calgary Herald) First the Canadarm, now the CanaDrill. Canada's newest role in space is taking shape in Sudbury, where a bunch of mining experts began asking: "Since Canadians are so good at drilling for gold and nickel, why not go and drill on Mars?" This is a serious proposal, worth $625,000 so far to the Canadian Space Agency. The CanaDrill is conceived as a robotic drill, battery powered and diamond tipped, that would fly to Mars on an unmanned NASA lander similar to the wildly successful Mars Pathfinder of 1997. Thursday, August 22, 2002 A Summer on 'Mars' Since 1997 Pascal Lee has spent his summers on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, studying the Haughton Crater site as a Mars analog. In doing so, he and other scientists are learning more about the Red Planet’s geology, possible biology, and the technology, hardware designs, and strategies relevant to future explorations of Mars. The following is his report on the 2002 summer field season. Microbes 'could survive on Mars' Microbes may be able to survive on Mars according to new simulations of the Martian environment. Researchers used a device called the Andromeda Chamber to simulate Martian conditions. They discovered that microorganisms called methanogens could grow at low pressures. They say their findings imply that life could have existed on the Red Planet in the past, present, or at some point in the future. Wednesday, August 21, 2002 IBM's BlueBoard Technology on the Red Planet Technology used to plan the next Mars mission is catching up with the technology of the spacecraft themselves. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory plan to use a giant plasma-screen electronic "whiteboard," based on IBM technology, to evaluate data captured by the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs) once they have arrived on the Red Planet. Inspired by IBM's BlueBoard technology, the screens are referred to as MERBoards (Mars Exploration Rover Boards), says Jay Trimble, head of the MERBoard design team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Ferrari red paint competes for an extraordinary qualification (esa) Ferrari has recently faced some tough challenges on the racetrack, but achieving the qualifications that will allow its famous red paint "Rosso Corsa" to go into space is another story altogether. In July, three test containers of Ferrari's red paint "Rosso Corsa" arrived at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in The Netherlands, in order to be tested in preparation for the journey to the Red Planet on-board Mars Express. Over the following weeks, the red paint sample, safely installed in a specially constructed glass globe 2cm in diameter, nicknamed "Fred", and sunk in a specially designed fibreglass supporting block, has been undergoing a severe testing process. Tuesday, August 20, 2002 NASA Sics Rover on Faux Mars (Wired.com) Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Monday completed a training exercise to prepare them for an exploration of Mars that they hope will bring them closer to answering questions about life on that planet. About 60 researchers from JPL, mostly field geologists, honed their skills in operating a Mars rover vehicle by using it to investigate the terrain of an undisclosed desert location somewhere in the American Southwest. To simulate conditions of controlling the rover on Mars, the specific site of the experiment was kept secret and the science team, which remotely guides the rover, was only allowed to make command decisions based on information received from the vehicle. Rehearsal Readies Scientists For NASA's Next Mars Landing With less than a year to go before the launch of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, scientists have spent the last few weeks at a high-tech summer camp, rehearsing their roles for when the spacecraft take center stage. "The purpose of this test is really to teach the science team how to remotely conduct field geology using a rover, rather than to test the rover hardware," said Dr. John Callas, science manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Prototype Mars rover passes final field trial (New Scientist) A prototype of two remote-controlled Mars rovers due for launch in 2003 has passed its final field tests in the desert in northern Arizona. NASA's Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) robot is a smaller, stripped-down model of the Mars Exploration Rovers - two identical robots that will explore the surface of Mars after touching down in January 2004. The rovers will have much greater mobility than the 1997 Pathfinder, and travel as far in one Martian day as the Pathfinder did in its lifetime. Planning Your Mars Vacation (Wired.com) Where would you stake your claim on the great desert planet? Oliver Morton, author of the new book Mapping Mars, asks the experts. Choosing a place to land on Mars should be easy. The planet's surface area is as great as that of all Earth's continents combined, and thanks to 30 years of space missions, it has been mapped in bewitching detail. Unfortunately, spacecraft are delicate constructions, and finding a safe spot to land them on rocky ground is a colossal headache. NASA researchers have been nursing that headache for years as they analyze hundreds of sites, trying to decide where a pair of rovers should arrive for a Mars mission in early 2004. Just as they were to make their final choices this spring, new wind modeling data sent the scientists back to their databases. But what if you weren't constrained by engineering and treacherous terrain? What if you didn't have to worry about rocks that would gut your lander's belly, or slopes it would roll down, or those pesky winds? What if you could simply choose any one of the 1,470 places on Mars that now have a name — or the countless more that don't? And what if the lander was not a robot, but you? Russian scientists set ambitious Mars mission for 2007 A Russian company plans to send a robot probe to a Martian moon in 2007, where it will take a small sample of soil and bring it back to Earth for analysis, the news agency Itar-Tass said Tuesday. The firm, Lavochkin, has made a mock-up of the probe and carried out a number of tests on it at a site at Kaluga, south of Moscow, it said, quoting Sergei Potekhin, director of OKB Kaluga, a firm that is also working on the scheme. If all goes well, the probe would head for Phobos, one of Mars' two moons, in 2007 and scrape up around 100 grammes (three ounces) of soil which it would then bring back to Earth, the report said. Monday, August 19, 2002 Team to analyze Mars data probe (Honolulu Star-Bulletin) Vast reservoirs of underground ice on the Red Planet and other exciting discoveries by Mars Odyssey will be reviewed in Honolulu this week by the team that developed the spacecraft's key instrument. "We were really surprised at just how much ice was buried just inches beneath the surface," William Boynton, of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Institute, said in an interview here. Mars Odyssey was launched by NASA on April 7 last year and is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It carries a Gamma Ray Spectrometer -- three instruments in one -- designed to analyze the chemical composition of Mars' surface and detect water at shallow depths. Webcast of Mars Rover Test Today Space.com reported earlier this month that the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco would produce the first live webcast ever of a secret Mars rover test in some American desert. The webcast is today at 2 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. PDT) and will be archived for later viewing. Mars crater is named after Bend (Bend Bulletin) Bend, apparently, has universal appeal. A local author researching a book on the exploration of Mars found that folks with NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) named a crater on the red planet after Bend. The crater was named in 1976 and is located at 22.6 degrees south and 27.8 degrees west on the planet. But don't break out the telescope looking for it. The crater is only 3.6 kilometers in diameter and can be seen only in pictures taken by spacecraft with high-powered cameras. Comparatively, the Bend crater is about one-third the size of Crater Lake. Mars-like Lab Conditions Support Life A laboratory experiment simulating conditions on Mars found that certain terrestrial microorganisms called methanogens can survive in extreme Mars-like conditions involving low air pressure. While the work does not by any means suggest there is or ever was life on Mars, it illustrates one possible way primitive organisms might have once thrived on the Red Planet or could even exist below the surface today, according to Tim Kral of the University of Arkansas. Kral led the experiment and presented it to colleagues during a bioastronomy conference in Australia last month. ‘Star Trek’ sensors monitor health Researchers are creating “Star Trek”-like radiation sensors that are so small, they could be absorbed into the white blood cells of astronauts and could someday be used to treat and diagnose illnesses. Astronauts constantly are exposed to radiation, and radiation-induced illness is a serious concern in space travel. The sensors would continuously monitor for early signs of damage, said Dr. James Baker Jr., a University of Michigan scientist who is directing the project. With the nanomolecular devices in their white blood cells, astronauts would feel no more intrusion than when they fly with regular staples, such as freeze-dried food. China aims high with Mars mission (The Washington Times) A wisp of wind blows red earth into the air and gusts over scorching black rock — the only sign of movement on a desert plain east of Jiuquan. Dry, lifeless and red, the area around this remote settlement, from where the first Chinese astronaut will be launched into space — possibly later this year — looks like a Martian landscape. It provides inspiration for an ambitious space program to conquer first the moon and then Mars. Despite the cost, estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars, and immense technical difficulties, China boasts that it will beat the United States with a manned mission to Mars. Going Up? Private Group Begins Work on Space Elevator The world's space programs are vertically challenged. What's needed is a revolutionary low-cost way to move payloads and people into Earth orbit and then outward to the asteroids, Mars and beyond. Now an upstart company of enterprising engineers and investment strategists want to tackle the ultimate high-rise project for the 21st century: the space elevator. They are on the ground floor of putting calculations to paper and wrestling with the toughest challenges. The message from the First International Space Elevator Conference, held here August 12-13, is that the concept is an idea whose time has come…well almost. World-class specialists in diverse fields -- from materials science, bridge building, and aerospace technology to law, business, and financing -- contend the project is on the up-and-up. Thursday, August 15, 2002 Microorganisms Grow At Low Pressures, Implying Possible Life On Mars (University of Arkansas) Using a unique device known as the Andromeda Chamber to simulate conditions found on Mars, University of Arkansas researchers discovered that certain microorganisms called methanogens could grow at low pressures. Their findings imply that life could have existed on the Red Planet in the past, present, or that it could do so at some point in the future. Associate professor of biological sciences Tim Kral presented the preliminary results at a bioastronomy conference in Australia in July. "Our goal is first to get the organisms to grow well, then systematically experiment with conditions found on Mars," said Kral. He and his team first grew test tube cultures of various methanogens in a Mars soil simulant called JSC Mars-1. Derived from altered volcanic ash, it approximates the composition, grain size, density, and magnetic properties of Martian soil. NASA Chooses Purdue to Study Colonies on Mars and Moon When they ran out of oxygen, the scientists living in Biosphere 2 were able to pop open a door and take a breath of fresh air. For astronauts living on Mars or the Moon, things won't be so convenient. Biosphere 2, after all, was located in a greenhouse-like structure in the Arizona desert. NASA’s effort at creating a sealed, self-sustaining environment must be successful the first time. "There was mostly faith behind Biosphere 2, with little research," says Purdue University Professor Cary Mitchell. "If [NASA] just sent people to Mars on a wing and a prayer like that, and the crew died, how long do you think it would be before Congress gave them money to do anything again?" Mitchell will resume directorship of the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training for Advanced Life Support (ALS NSCORT) on October 1. The focus of the Center is to study how to create a self-sustaining habitat for space colonies or long-term missions to the Moon or Mars. Sad in Space: Doctors Tackle Astronaut Depression German doctors are working on ways to help astronauts avoid the dangers of depression and boredom, which they say will be a key issue for long space missions like the one planned to Mars. Depression can demotivate astronauts and affect their ability to concentrate. Although astronauts are carefully screened for psychological well-being, the extreme pressures of space travel means depression can take hold, according to Dr. Klaus Legner, from the European Space Agency (ESA) Medical Support Office. The psychological pressure on crews, including long periods of isolation, could manifest themselves as anything from loneliness to arguments caused by enforced habitation of a small space with others, he said.