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The New Horizons Message Initiative

Many years ago the two Voyager spacecraft left on their missions to the outer planets and beyond. Each carries a golden record that contains digitized version of the sounds and images of Earth. It was and is an inspiring idea and one that tickles the imagination of anyone enamored of space exploration. The Voyagers, both on their way out of the solar system (one has, in fact entered interstellar space already), now bear a record of our time on Earth for anyone to find and interpret.

However, the Voyagers aren’t the only ones headed out. The Pioneer spacecraft are on their endless journey, and the New Horizons mission is on its way to Pluto and beyond. None of them carry any golden records, and artist Jon Lomberg has set out to correct that oversight for the New Horizons mission, which will pass by Pluto in July 2015. He has started the New Horizons Message Initiative, a petition to have an electronic message placed aboard the spacecraft. As Jon states on the project page, the form and content are still TBD, but would likely be images and some sounds.

The poster for the New Horizons Message Initiative

Jon is a space artist; you may have seen much of his work in the original Cosmos series with Carl Sagan. He was the design director for the original Voyager golden record. He also designed and worked on the amazing Galaxy Garden on the Big Island of Hawai’i that I wrote about some months ago.

The New Horizons Message Initiative has a stellar board of advisors, and they are now gathering signatures to petition NASA to allow the design of some kind of message to transmit to New Horizons. Once NASA has approved, then a Kickstarter campaign will begin to raise money to work up the message and develop the techniques of storing the message aboard the spacecraft. In addition, the group plans an educational outreach component to excite people’s imaginations about the concept of sending a new message out to the universe.

Like the idea? Many other people do, including the Principal Investigator for New Horizons and an old friend, Dr. Alan Stern. Join him, me and such folks as actor Levar Burton in support of sending a message from Earth to the cosmos. Check out the Web page and sign the petition. I did—what’s not to like about letting the cosmos know we are here?

But, Finding Clues of Life There Gets Harder

Scoops from the surface of Mars yielded soil samples rich in water. Courtesy NASA/Mars Science Laboratory team

The news this week that Mars has water bound up in its soil fulfills at least one of the goals of the Mars Curiosity mission: to find evidence of water. It’s one more checkmark in the “search for evidence of life” column, and it came after one of the first tests to look for water by the roving science lab. Curiosity’s ChemCam shot lasers at samples of soil and sediments it scooped up on the surface of Mars. The laser testing turned up high amounts of hydrogen, which is indicative of water in bound up in the soils.

This is great news because it really clinches the idea that Mars has water. In the past it had lots more, likely flowing across the surface. These days, Mars water is locked inside rocks and sediments, and makes up a frozen subsurface layer similar to permafrost here on Earth. Future Martian explorers who make their homes on Mars should theoretically be able to heat those rocks and distill water out of them to aid in their long-term survival.

The next item on the tickbox of successful Mars exploration will be to find evidence of life. However, another finding released this week proves that it’s tougher to provide that evidence than people thought. That’s because the Martian surface sediments are permeated with the chemical compound perchlorate, and it interferes with the tests that Curiosity does to look for traces of past life.

Perchlorate is a salt made up of chlorine and oxygen. When it’s part of the soil that Curiosity tests, perchlorate causes another chemical reaction that actually destroys carbon—and carbon is part of all living beings that we know about on Earth. If life existed on Mars, then it’s logical to assume it would also contain carbon. And, when an organism dies, it leaves behind carbon traces. So, the presence of perchlorates makes testing for life much trickier. In fact, that presence will likely cause scientists to change their methods and techniques as they search for the chemical remains of past life on Mars.

Mars is turning out to be a very intriguing study target for planetary scientists. It’s a puzzle, but one that we’ll eventually solve, particularly when we send people to the Red Planet to do direct investigations.

Want to know more about these findings? Read about the water discovery here and the perchlorate work here.

The Spacewriter's Ramblings

Speak for Earth

The New Horizons Message Initiative

Mars Has Water

But, Finding Clues of Life There Gets Harder

Exploring Science and the Cosmos