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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 11, Number 27, 29 June 2004
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter
Volume 11, Number 27, 29 June 2004
Editor/Publisher: David J. Thomas, Ph.D., Science Division, Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas 72503-2317, USA.
Marsbugs is published on a weekly to monthly basis as warranted by the number of articles and announcements. Copyright of this compilation exists with the editor, except for specific articles, in which instance copyright exists with the author/authors. Opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the authors, and are not necessarily endorsed by the editor or by Lyon College. E-mail subscriptions are free, and may be obtained by contacting the editor. Information concerning the scope of this newsletter, subscription formats and availability of back-issues is available at The editor does not condone "spamming" of subscribers. Readers would appreciate it if others would not send unsolicited e-mail using the Marsbugs mailing lists. Persons who have information that may be of interest to subscribers of Marsbugs should send that information to the editor.
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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 11, Number 27, 29 June 2004
Articles and News
Page 1THE SPACE SIMULATOR—MODELING THE UNIVERSE ON A BUDGET
Los Alamos National Laboratory release
Page 2DARK DAYS DOOMED DINOSAURS, SAY PURDUE SCIENTISTS
By Chad Boutin
Page 3I WANT MY SCI-TV
By Leslie Mullen
Page 3THE FUTURE OF TRAVEL: AQUATIC TO COSMIC DESTINATIONS
By Leonard David
Page 4MARTIAN SAND LIFE: EVIDENCE AND PREDICTIONS
By Francisco J. Oyarzun
Page 7NASA RESEARCHERS CONSIDER MOBILE LUNAR BASE CONCEPTS
NASA/ARC release 04-64AR
Announcements
Page 8"RETURN TO THE LORD OF THE RINGS"—SATURN EXPLORATION PRESENTATIONS AT LYON COLLEGE
Lyon College release
Page 8SECOND CONFERENCE ON EARLY MARS
Lunar and Planetary Institute release
Page 8PUBLIC INVITED TO VIEW CASSINI BROADCAST AT NASA EXPLORATION CENTER
NASA/ARC release 04-62AR
Page 8NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX
By David J. Thomas
Mission Reports
Page 8CASSINI UPDATES
NASA, ESA and University of Arizona releases
Page 13DEEP IMPACT MISSION UPDATE
NASA/JPL/Ball Aerospace release
Page 13MARS ROVER SURPRISES CONTINUE; SPIRIT, TOO, FINDS HEMATITE
NASA/JPL release 2004-161
Page 15MARS EXPRESS UPDATES
ESA releases
Page 16MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES
NASA/JPL/MSSS release
Page 16MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES
NASA/JPL/ASU release
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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 11, Number 27, 29 June 2004
1
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 11, Number 27, 29 June 2004
THE SPACE SIMULATOR—MODELING THE UNIVERSE ON A BUDGET
Los Alamos National Laboratory release
22 June 2004
For the past several years, a team of University of California astrophysicists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been using a cluster of roughly 300 computer processors to model some of the most intriguing aspects of the Universe. Called the Space Simulator, this de facto supercomputer has not only proven itself to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, but has also demonstrated that modeling and simulation of complex phenomena, from supernovae to cosmology, can be done on a fairly economical basis.
According to Michael Warren, one of the Space Simulator's three principal developers, "Our goal was to acquire a computer which would deliver the highest performance possible on the astrophysics simulations we wanted to run, while remaining within the modest budget that we were allotted. Building the Space Simulator turned out to be a excellent choice."
The Space Simulator is a 294-node Beowulf cluster with theoretical peak performance just below 1.5 teraflops, or trillions of floating point operations per second. Each Space Simulator processing node looks much like a computer you would find at home than at a supercomputer center, consisting of a Pentium 4 processor, 1 gigabyte of 333 MHz SDRAM, an 80 gigabyte hard drive and a gigabit Ethernet card. Each individual node cost less than $1,000 and the entire system cost under $500,000. The cluster achieved Linpack performance of 665.1 gigaflops per second on 288 processors in October 2002, making it the 85th fastest computer in the world, according to the 20th TOP500 list (see A gigaflop is a billion floating-point operations per second.
Since 2002, the Space Simulator has moved down to #344 on the most recent TOP500 list as faster computers are built, but Warren and his colleagues are not worried. They built the Space Simulator to do specific astrophysics research, not to compete with other computers. It was never designed to compete with Laboratory's massive supercomputers and, in fact, is not scalable enough to do so.
The Space Simulator has been used almost continuously for theoretical astrophysics simulations since it was built, and has spent much of the past year calculating the evolution of the Universe. The first results of that work were recently presented at a research conference in Italy by Los Alamos postdoctoral research associate Luis Teodoro. Further analysis of the simulations, in collaboration with Princeton University professor Uros Seljak, will soon be published in the prestigious journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In addition to simulating the structure and evolution of the Universe, the Space Simulator has been used to study the explosions of massive stars and to help understand the X-ray emission from the center of our galaxy.
The Space Simulator is actually the Laboratory's third generation Beowulf cluster. The first was Loki, which was constructed in 1996 from 16 200 MHz Pentium Pro processors. Loki was followed by the Avalon cluster, which consisted of 144 alpha processors. The Space Simulator follows the same basic architecture as these previous Beowulf machines, but is the first to use Gigabit Ethernet as the network fabric, and requires significantly less space than a cluster using typical computers. The Space Simulator runs parallel N-body algorithms, which were originally designed for astrophysical applications involving gravitational interactions, but have since been used to model more complex particle systems. In addition to Warren, the developers of the Space Simulator include Los Alamos staff members Chris Fryer and Patrick Goda.
Los Alamos' Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program provided funding for the Space Simulator research. LDRD funds basic and applied research and development focusing on employee-initiated creative proposals selected at the discretion of the Laboratory director. Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the U.S. Department of Energy and works in partnership with NNSA's Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories to support NNSA in its mission.
Read the original news release at
An additional article on this subject is available at
DARK DAYS DOOMED DINOSAURS, SAY PURDUE SCIENTISTS
By Chad Boutin
Purdue University release
23 June 2004
Though the catastrophe that destroyed the dinosaurs' world may have begun with blazing fire, it probably ended with icy darkness, according to a Purdue University research group. By analyzing fossil records, a team of scientists including Purdue's Matthew Huber has found evidence that the Earth underwent a sudden cooling 65 million years ago that may have taken millennia to abate completely. The fossil rock samples, taken from a well-known archaeological site in Tunisia, show that tiny, cold-loving ocean organisms called dinoflagellates and benthic formanifera appeared suddenly in an ancient sea that had previously been very warm. While some scientists have long theorized that a meteorite's fiery collision with Earth was in some way responsible for the mass extinction of many dinosaur species, the discovery provides the first physical evidence of the global cooling that likely followed the impact.
"This is the first time anyone has found a fossil record indicating the Earth cooled significantly at that time," said Huber, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in Purdue's School of Science. "It is likely that the object that struck the Earth hurled huge quantities of sulfate aerosols high into the atmosphere, which darkened and cooled the planet's surface for several years afterward.
"This discovery, which certainly has relevance to theories about dinosaur extinction, is also significant because it confirms our computer models of the Earth's climate—they predict that the climate would respond in this way under the circumstances. That's encouraging for those of us who are trying to understand what our climate is doing now."
The research, which Huber conducted with first author Simone Galeotti of the University of Urbino, Italy, and Henk Brinkhuis of the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, appears in the current (June 2004) issue of the scientific journal, Geology.
Though dispute continues over what caused the dinosaurs' extinction, many scientists are convinced that a meteorite several miles wide struck the Earth at Chicxulub (pronounced "CHIX-a-lube") off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, causing a global catastrophe that wiped out nearly all large land animals. The details of this catastrophe are still poorly understood, though the heat from the explosion likely caused a worldwide atmospheric firestorm that within hours killed many large land animals—most famously, the dinosaurs (for recent evidence supporting this theory, see related Web site, The evidence Huber's team has uncovered provides a complimentary story: after the initial firestorm abated, the particles hurled into the atmosphere from the impact cooled the Earth's surface by filtering out much of the sunlight.
"Whatever dinosaurs survived the initial cataclysm, whether by burrowing underground or hiding in the water, would have emerged to find their world rapidly growing cold and dark," Huber said. "Without warmth or sunlight, nourishment got scarce in a hurry."
The team found evidence of the cooling in rocks found at El Kef in Tunisia, a site that shows the boundary in time between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods 65 million years ago. This so-called "K-T boundary" is well-known as the time of the mass extinction that wiped out most dinosaurs. In the El Kef rocks, which during the Cretaceous were submerged beneath a warm-water ocean, Huber's colleagues found fossilized dinoflagellates that ordinarily appeared only in colder regions.
"The fossils indicate that something suddenly made the water cold enough to support these tiny critters," Huber said. "We theorize that the meteor strike produced huge quantities of sulfate particles, such as are often blown high into the atmosphere during a volcanic eruption, and these particles shielded the Earth's surface from sunlight. The decrease in solar energy ultimately caused a long cold spell, called an 'impact winter,' that persisted for years."
A reasonable theory, Huber said, is that the oceans cooled because they lost most of their heat to the chilly atmosphere above, which was no longer being heated by the sun. Had this cooling effect continued long enough, the surface of the oceans might have frozen solid, turning Earth into a giant snowball.
"The oceans evidently retained enough residual heat to remain liquid while the aerosols slowly left the atmosphere," he said. "Our climate models indicate that a snowball Earth would develop after an eight-year-long impact winter, but as the oceans did not freeze completely at the K-T boundary, the winter probably lasted five years or less."
Huber said that while life on the planet's surface was probably back on the road to recovery 30 years or so following the impact, the fossil records show the cold-loving dinoflagellates were present at El Kef for as long as 2,000 years afterward.
"It took much longer for the oceans to get back to normal," Huber said. "Prolonged feedback effects may have kept the ocean depths cold for many centuries."
The research results are good news for scientists, Huber said, because they bolster existing theories about the behavior of Earth's climate.
"This evidence is encouraging because it suggests that our computer models are correct in predicting the climate's response to a major perturbation," he said. "Our computer simulations indicate that if you turned off the sun today, this sort of winter would engulf the planet. Finding data about an impact winter 65 million years ago is encouraging, because it means that historical evidence lines up with our theory and models of climate."
These models need to be as accurate as possible, he added, if we are to comprehend the effects of aerosol particles on global warming.
"The results point to the critical role of the potential cooling effects of aerosols, which is very important for predicting the effects of humans on climate," he said. "Although human influences on aerosols are much more subtle than those thought to have resulted from the K-T boundary event, coal-fired power plants and biomass burning are also important aerosol sources. A better representation of aerosols' effects is crucial for understanding future climate changes as well as those in the deep past."
Huber is affiliated with the Purdue Climate Change Research Center, which promotes and organizes research and education on global climate change and studies its impacts on agriculture, natural ecosystems and society.
Contacts:
Chad Boutin
Phone: 765-494-2081
E-mail:
Matthew Huber
Phone: 765-494-0652,
E-mail:
Purdue News Service
Phone: 765-494-2096
E-mail:
Read the original news release at
An additional article on this subject is available at
I WANT MY SCI-TV
By Leslie Mullen
From Astrobiology Magazine
23 June 2004
Talk to any scientist for long, and you'll discover that they first fell in love with science through movies, books, or TV. Scientists are not the only ones who love science in their entertainment. Among the top grossing movies of all time are the Star Wars films, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial andJurassic Park. Science fiction novels have legions of fans, and science is the basis for popular TV dramas like "CSI" and "Star Trek," as well as for reality shows like "MythBusters" on the Discovery Channel.
Yet for all its popularity, science entertainment apparently does little to educate. In a recent survey by the National ScienceFoundation, only 50 percent of respondents knew that it takes the Earth a year to go around the Sun. About the same number ofpeople didn't know that an electron is smaller than an atom, or that ancient humans and dinosaurs lived at different times.
One of the problems with using entertainment to educate is that the science is often wrong. Web sites like "Bad Astronomy" and"Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics" go into amusing detail about the mistakes and poor information contained in certain movies andTV shows. But as Phil Plait, the creator of "Bad Astronomy" says on his web site, "Don't get me wrong: I love science fiction. When I was a kid Ilived on a straight diet of 'Lost in Space', 'Star Trek' and 'Space: 1999.' I still do! Even though the science in these shows is usuallypretty bad, they do serve the great purpose of getting people excited about science, space and astronomy."
Getting people excited about space exploration is a goal of the President's Commission on the Moon, Mars and Beyond. In histestimony to the Commission, TV Producer John Bernardoni noted that America is on the edge of losing its technological dominanceto other countries.
"Somebody told me that China graduated 300,000 aerospace engineers to our 58,000," said Bernardoni. "I was at the NationalSpace Symposium when I heard that. Japan graduated something like 225,000. That's scary—you talk about outsourcing, it's going tomake what's happening now look pretty silly. If anybody really wants this to be an international effort, they're not going to have toworry about it—it will be an international effort because, like it or not, that's where all the people will be coming from."
A New York Times article published on May 3 reported that Americans are losing their scientific dominance to the rest of the world. Everything from the number of Nobel Prizes and patents awarded to the number of scientific papers published has fallen in the U.S.,while those numbers have increased in other nations.
Bernardoni says one way to generate more interest among the youth of America is for government to fund more missions to space,and for the entertainment industry to create more programming about science. Bernardoni talked about his own boyhood fascinationwith the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, and how his interest was fueled by movies like Forbidden Planet,It Came from Outer Space,The Day the Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds.
"I was at a meeting where a group of scientists were griping about why more kids weren't signing up for aerospace," says Bernardoni. "I stood up and said, 'Why should they? There is no big audacious goal, therefore there are no missions. If there are no missions, there are no jobs. So what's the point?' I said, 'You want to get kids pumped up? You've got to have a vision. You get them pumped up through MTV, you get them pumped up through video games, you get them pumped up though 'The Simpsons.' You'vegot to go where they live, you've got to go to the music that their peers like—that's how you get to kids, you do not get to kids through job fairs.'"