FMARS Sponsors	Dispatch from FMARS Robert Zubrin - Saturday, July 13, 2002 EVA-2 Report | Science Reports | Reflectance Report | Photo Gallery EVA crew of Robert Zubrin, Nell Beedle, Frank Eckhardt, and Shannon Hinsa leaving Flashline Station. The weather this morning was overcast, cold and damp, but it was not raining or snowing. So we finally got a chance to do our first long distance EVA. Our mobility tool is the All Terrain Vehicle, or ATV. ATVs are similar to four wheeled motorcycles. They can travel over steep boulder cover hillsides and other kinds of rough ground that most would not think passable to any wheeled vehicle, and they are light enough to be lifted by human muscle power if they get stuck. While our ATVs run on gasoline engines that would not work on Mars, similar vehicles could be designed that would run on methanol fuel cells. These would work fine on the Red Planet, and as an added advantage, their fuel could be readily made on Mars by combining Martian water with atmospheric carbon dioxide. Techniques for doing this with miniaturized automated equipment have been demonstrated in a number of labs on Earth, including my own. The major point however is that Mars is a big place, and cannot be explored on foot. Large pressurized rovers that provide shirtsleeve atmospheres for their crews are attractive in a number of respects, as they can travel long distances and durations. But they weigh a lot, and thus will be costly to transport to Mars. Also, they cannot deal with terrain anywhere as rough as an ATV, and should they get stuck, they're sunk, at least until AAA sets up offices on Mars. So for first generation of Martian pioneers, light equestrian vehicles will be the way to go. Mars will be explored in the saddle. EVA team driving ATVs across Von Braun Planitia. The EVA team was led by me, and included geologists Nell Beadle and Frank Eckardt, and biologist Shannon Hinsa, with K. Mark riding along out of sim to provide armed lookout for polar bears. We started suiting up around 10:10 AM and made it out the lock 50 minutes later. We then crossed the Lowell Canal and headed north across the flat plain called the Von Braun Planitia. Out first stop there was a place named Marine Rock, after the US Marines whose paradrops in 2000 brought in the materials that were used to build Flashline Station. Marine Rock is about 3 km from the Station, and we had no difficulty communicating direct line of sight from there to the hab. Frank took GPS coordinates for a waypoint there, and then we pressed on 3 more kilometers north where we dismounted to climb a large outcrop. From the top of this formation we had an excellent view in all directions, including a vista of a group of lakes several kilometers further to the north. We therefore named this hill Lakeview Rock. We also noted that we could obtain satisfactory radio link to the Flashline Station from the hilltop, marking it out as a good potential location for a radio repeater to enable communication across the whole northern sector of our exploration zone. We marked another waypoint on the hilltop and then continued on further to the north, proceeding to a point identifiable in our landsat satellite images as a location where a small lake empties into a modest river. We took another GPS waypoint here. So now we had three widely spaced GPS waypoints that correspond to terrain features that we can see in the landsat images. This will allow us to impose a map grid on the satellite image points, accurate to within 10 meters. The result will be a spectacular aid to surface navigation and exploration. I should add that in weird places like Devon Island or Mars, electronic methods of navigation will be a necessity. Because of the foreign nature of the environment, much of everything you see looks "the same," and it is easy to get lost. On Earth we can use GPS systems, and while it is unlikely that anything as good will be available on Mars for some time, an adequate solution for the near-term would be a network of surface radio beacons similar to the old-style LORAN. These could be placed on the ground by the crew of a Mars mission (along with their radio repeaters), or conceivably dropped from orbit. While obtaining biological samples at the lake, Shannon found an insect exoskeleton. Insects, like most other macroscopic life, are rare on Devon; you generally see about one a year. So finding an insect skeleton was remarkable, and we therefore named the lake Skeleton Lake, and the river draining it the Hinsa River. We then started our return trip. We first decided to go back by a slightly different route than our outbound leg, but got caught on a kind of peninsula of raised ground surrounded on three sides by steep rocky slopes too dangerous to descend. This reflects a characteristic problem in navigating on Devon that may also exist on Mars. The ground is cut by numerous runoff channels. If you try to stay on the high ground where you can see where you are going, you run the risk of encountering an impassible channel. If you stay low in the channels, you can't see very far. So we doubled back and changed our plan to return via our original path. In this decision we were assisted by an innovation which Frank had created the night before in the hab, and which had been duly ridiculed by the rest of the crew as the ultimate in techno-dorkiness. This was the forearm mounting of his fancy path-tracking GPS. With this unique piece of apparel, Frank could read real-time our position and compare it to our outbound path while riding a moving ATV. Using this device backtracking to Marine Rock was a snap. Robert and Frank with their samples. Robert's is potential stromatolite, the kind of fossil that bacteria leave on Earth and that explorers will search for on Mars. Marine Rock is geologically interesting, and Nell and Frank had a good time there for an hour exploring the formation. I'm not a geologist, so much of what they found fascinating was invisible to me. But I am an amateur fossil collector, and directed my efforts accordingly. I came across some rocks with networks of surface ridges that looked like brain coral. However when the geologists broke open the rocks, there was no continuation of the coral-like phenomenon in their interior. This indicated that the coral-looking rocks were really just weathered limestone. I was rewarded however, after a further hour of searching, with something much better, a convoluted rock that may well be a stromatolite. Stromatolites are fossils left by colonies of bacteria, and constitute the oldest evidence of life on Earth. Scientists have found stromatolites dating back 3.5 billion years, to the same period when there were oceans of liquid water on Mars. The surface of Mars has probably been cold and dry for at least two billion years, but if life evolved on Mars at the same rate it did on Earth, there could well be fossil stromatolites there today. Attempting to find them will thus be a top priority for Mars explorers, as they could be the key to demonstrating that the development of life from chemistry is a common phenomenon in the universe. Now I have to say this: While I, wearing a bulky spacesuit with a half-fogged visor, found a probable stromatolite in about an hour at Marine Rock, I don't think that a robotic rover like the Sojourner could ever have found it. Stromatolites are not obvious fossils like trilobites or mollusks. They are very subtle. Finding them requires not only doing a great deal of walking around, but taking the equivalent of millions of high resolution photographs with your eyes, processing them for subtle clues, following the clues up by bending down and examining the rocks from different angles or close up, dusting some off, rejecting false leads, and then doing it all again and again, until you find a sample worthy of close examination by a geologist. From the point of view of the search for life on Mars, the most interesting thing found at Marine Rock today was that candidate stromatolite. But a robot would have missed it. So the bottom line is that if we are really serious about finding out whether there is, or ever was, life on Mars, we are going to have to send people. Mars: If we don't go, we won't know.
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