What I’ve learned about Mars

My liveblog of the Mars exploration press briefing at AAAS. I’m ill with a head cold, so I can’t quite hear too well, this is my best guess at what is going on…

1) The surface area of Mars is equal to Earth’s, if you don’t count the oceans. (Charles Elachi, JPL)
2) The Phoenix lander is not using airbags to land, like the rovers did.
3) Spirit and Opportunity, it is day 1,464 of their ninety-day mission to mars. (Steven Squyres, Cornell)
4) Spirit is now on Home Plate, a plateau that formed from a volcanic deposit.
5) Spirit’s right front wheel is busted, but digs a little trench as it moves along (backwards)
6) Day 1,200 they found silica (silica valley!) as Spirit dug a little up, evidence of hydrothermal activity. Represents the former existence of a habitable environment.
7) Spirit is parked for the Winter, taking on the role of a weather station.
8) Opportunity has moved from Endurance Crater to Victoria Crater, a pretty long trek.
9) Opportunity is busy descending down the slope of Victoria Crater. (Opportunity. doesn’t have a drill, but “Mars has been kind enough to provide holes to look into.”

10) While the discovery phase of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission has been underway, but the interpretation phase is only just starting. (Andrew Knoll, Harvard)
11) MER wasn’t designed to find life, but it has some tools that might help pick out life.
12) MER was designed to find environmental questions.
13) Was water there? Yes, but they’re thinking about when. How? Sedimentation! You can measure how salty the water was by how much has precipitated out into sedimentation.
14) How salty? Really, really salty. Salty enough that most life couldn’t survive in it.

15) The best place to look for evidence of Martian life is in its earliest history, the first 600 million years. They know the material to look at, they’ve seen it from orbit, and the next rover will probably visiting one of those spots.

16) Phoenix Lander in a few months. MSL rover, Mars Scientific Laboratory, will follow, launching in September 2009. (Richard Cook, JPL)
17) MSL is five times heavier than the MERs. Supposed to last two years by design, as opposed to the 90 days for Spirit and Opportunity.
18) Pick up rocks and feed to instruments inside the rover. It eats.
19) Keep building, scientifically and technologically.

Now the Q&A…paraphrasing…

Alan Boyle, MSNBC: The water on mars was particularly salty, does that mesh with the idea the water was particularly acidic?
Andrew Knoll: We’re now alleging the water was salty. some of the salts formed under low pH. Does it effect the chances that there were microorganisms? Yeah. Thousands of papers on the tolerances of microorganisms (food service)…so there’s stuff to work with.

Special point…Alan Boyle is right in front of me, how cool is that? I told you I love this meeting.

Q: MER wasn’t designed to look for life, to what extent will MSL have instruments designed to look for life?
Knoll: We don’t know if life ever existed there, but we know that Mars has an environmental history, which has a lot of value in its own right. In that context, any instruments we carry ought to be useful for finding life, but also useful for broader environmental recognition.
Steven Squyres: If life exists there, it is subsurface. Look down and up — check the atmosphere for byproducts of underground life.

I’ve missed a few questions…headache and headcold is running static on my head.

Few statements from Squyres…Rovers and Phoenix share orbital assets. Phoenix probably won’t last much longer than its expiration date since it is landing near the Martian north pole, which can get nasty.

What is the current favorite landing site for MSL?
Cook: we’re down to a set of about six, for prime interesting places. The prime site will be selected in the next six to nine months. Try to find the place that may have been habitable AND may have been able to preserve signs of the habitation.

Also, Richard Cook looks like Joss Whedon.

Andrew Knoll…Bombardment! How could have bombardment (Bombardment!) been detrimental to life? High probability that Mars was hit by something that could have sterilized Mars. On Earth, during the bombardment (BOMBARDMENT!) period, life could have hid in deep water vents to survive bombardment (Bombardment!)

OK, its over. I might say hi to Boyle, but Im ill, so I doubt I’ll expose the poor guy to my germs.

Now I’m going to sit down and clear my head.

UPDATE: I’m home. Still icky. Next year: I resolve not to be sick and to bring a camera, maybe some sort of audio recording gadget. The life-size MSL is wicked huge, as the locals (Bostonians, not Martians) would say. It’s like they’re launching a Cabriolet to another planet.