Mars

In the late 70's meteoriticists began to speculate that some oddball meteorites might be from Mars. These meteorites looked more like terrestrial rocks than meteorites, but they were seen to fall- Chassigny in 1815, Shergotty in 1865, and Nakhla in 1911. The big question, how these SNC meteorites got here, seemed to be solved by the "spall mechanism", a combination of high velocity and low shock pressure.

Dr. David Blake of the NASA research Center is the chief designer and Principle Investigator of the CHEMIN instrument on the Mars Science Laboratory Rover 'Curiosity', which is now investigating evidence of liquid-borne sediments at Gale Crater on Mars. He will give an insider's view into the mission and update us on the latest results from the MSL mission.

NASA's Curiosity Rover has been exploring its landing region at Gale Crater on Mars since August 5, 2012, searching for environments in early Mars' history that may have been habitable, able to support microbial life.  Much of the first 90 sols has been dedicated to engineering checkouts and initial uses of the instruments.  The rover operations to date will be discussed, along with some initial scientific results regarding the geology, mineralogy, and environmental conditions at Gale Crater on Mars.

In this talk, Dr. Phillips will address several outstanding questions regarding the dynamics of geological processes in solar system bodies. She will address several key areas she has studied on Io, Europa and Mars including dark slope streaks on Mars, impact cratering and change detection on icy satellites, and ongoing volcanic activity on Io. She will also give a brief update on the status of the Mars Curiosity rover.

Special Talk at 1pm.

Methane has been reported by several observers as a short-lived trace gas in the martian atmosphere. If verified, this would be an extraordinary result. Is the evidence for methane extraordinary? In this talk, Dr. Kevin Zahnle will discuss why one should remain skeptical of Methane on Mars.

Space radiation poses significant risks to human explorers on extended missions beyond Low-Earth Orbit. Crews cannot be fully shielded against Galactic Cosmic Rays owing to their high energies, and sporadic but intense Solar Particle Events may also be hazardous when shielding is minimal. The physics underlying the transport of these particles through matter is reasonably well understood, but the biological response has large uncertainties. In this talk I will give an overview of these risks and describe NASA's ongoing program to mitigate them.

There are four worlds in our Solar System that have substantial atmospheres and observable surfaces: Venus, Earth, Mars, and Titan. The effects of an atmosphere interacting with a surface are clear: each of these planetary bodies has sand seas covering some fraction of its surface. Hidden within the morphology of these dunes lies a record of climate change that scientists are only beginning to understand.

Dr. Mahaffy is the Principle Investigator for the SAM analysis suite on Mars Science Laboratory Rover (Curiosity). An important goal of upcoming missions to Mars is to understand if life could have developed there. The task of the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite of instruments and the other Curiosity investigations is to move us steadily toward that goal with an assessment of the habitability of our neighboring planet through a series of chemical and geological measurements.

Life may have arisen independently on both Mars and Earth, may survive in subsurface niches on Mars, and may manifest itself via emission of gases such as methane. Microbes adapted to life in ice at low temperatures metabolize at a rate many orders of magnitude lower than their rate for exponential growth. Life in solid ice survives either until nutrients and bioelements are consumed or until alpha-particles from U and Th in the ice induce too many double-strand breaks.