Thursday, July 3, 2008

Mars plane, anti-dust tech follow NASA grants

By Brendan Lynch

Thirty-six million miles is a long way to go to play in the dirt — but local researchers have been granted millions of dollars to do just that on Mars.

The University of Vermont, Tufts University and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory are getting their hands dirty in the Martian soil and dust to determine what, if anything, once may have lived on the red planet — and who might live there yet.

While Massachusetts doesn’t attract much commercial aerospace business today, the aerospace dollars it does get — the top five schools received $51.8 million from NASA in fiscal 2007 — are more focused on academia, said Robert Kispert, university and federal programs director of the John Adams Innovation Institute.

But the most recent projects represent a sample of cutting-edge work being done in New England labs around the latest space race: studying the prospects for life on Mars.

Dust on Mars can be as small as cigarette-smoke particles and becomes electrostatically charged — and thereby adhesive — in sandstorms. That dust could interfere with instruments and solar panels or penetrate spacesuits and hatches, possibly getting into astronauts’ lungs — but a professor of engineering at the University of Vermont is poised to land $750,000 from NASA to combat problems from dust on Mars and the moon to enable long-term habitation.
Researcher Jeff Marshall said his team plans to develop a “smart surface” that would clean itself of dust particles via vibration, or a sweeping electromagnetic field. The grant, which UVM will match, is pending a NASA vetting of collaborators from Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Before the project, Marshall had never designed a product intended to be used by people living in space for a matter of years — and it’s likely no one else has either, he said.

“If you send a spaceship up to Mars, you don’t just stay for two days and go home,” he said.

Digging in the dirt
Samuel Kounaves, a chemistry professor at Tufts University, is a co-investigator on NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission and the lead on the wet chemistry lab, part of the Phoenix lander’s payload. The wet chem lab places Martian soil in water and analyzes it using 26 electrochemical sensors in a small cup.

So far, Phoenix has found that Mars isn’t as hostile to life as once thought, Kounaves said. In addition to the much-publicized discovery of ice on the Martian surface, the wet chem lab has detected some of the minerals necessary for life as we know it in the soil: potassium, sodium, chloride and magnesium.

“This is the first time we’re actually tasting the planet,” Kounaves said.

The launch, landing and deployment of the wet chem lab unfolded “flawlessly,” and represented the payoff to years of work, Kounaves said.

“I just can’t describe it,” he said. “It’s amazing to me.”

Kounaves is working on the 5-year-old, $450 million project at the University of Arizona Tuscon with three Tufts students, one of whom started as an undergrad, stayed on to complete a master’s degree and is now working on a doctorate. “This thing just turned him on,” Kounaves said. “For me, I wish I had this chance (when I was a student).”

Draper’s Mars plane
In Cambridge, longtime collaborator Draper Lab has sunk about $1 million of its own money into advancing Kounaves’ work for future Mars missions. While Kounaves called his project a “chemistry lab in a teacup,” Draper is using printed circuit-board technology to shrink even that teacup, so the lab could be deployed on a rover rather than a lander on future missions, according to Draper’s director of space systems, Seamus Tuohy.

“A thimble?” Tuohy suggested. “What’s smaller than a thimble?”

Draper, working with Aurora Flight Sciences and NASA’s Langley Research Center, developed a Mars plane for the current mission on a $10 million NASA grant, but NASA instead chose the Phoenix lander about three years ago. That spacecraft would have transformed into a plane upon entering Mars’ atmosphere and would have been able to reach areas rovers can’t, such as the red planet’s deep canyons, according to Tuohy. The Mars plane, which Tuohy called a mature design, is still a viable technology for future missions.

Tuohy said he was happy to see the Phoenix mission’s findings, even though Draper sat out this round.

“They provide a reason to go again and do more interesting things,” he said.