ASU is taking its Mars efforts to new depths with a proposal to blast two craters into the Red Planet in order to search for subsurface water, and possibly, microbiotic life.
The proposed project would hurl two heavy copper balls into key locations on Mars, possibly exposing ice made of water, said Greg Mehall, mission manager for the ASU Mars Space Flight Facility.
"We think that this water ice will start evaporating and we'll see plumes of water gas," Mehall said.
ASU researchers proposed the Tracing Habitability, Organics and Resources project, or THOR, to NASA in August. By November the team will know if they were selected as one of three projects to compete for NASA funding.
If the team wins NASA's bid, the $450 million mission would launch October 2011 and reach Mars by September 2012, Mehall said.
Water on Mars could mean life once existed on the planet, Mehall said.
"We're not talking about little green men with big eyeballs," he said. "We're talking small single-organism life. There's a possibility that there either was life or could still be microbiotic life."
Professor Phil Christensen, the principal investigator for the mission, said past Mars missions have merely scratched the surface of the planet.
"The time has come to take Martian studies a step further and deeper," he said. "This unexplored region of Mars may provide chemical and mineral clues to tell us about habitable areas on the planet."
The mission would include several instruments in addition to the copper ball projectiles. An orbiting space craft, for example, would be equipped with an infrared spectrometer that measures the composition of gases, rocks and minerals, Mehall said.
In addition to searching for water, the mission would also track methane gas, which has already been discovered on Mars. On Earth, methane is often associated with life.
"Methane is an organic gas that forms only typically when there's some type of decomposition or gases emitted from living organisms," Mehall said.
The proposal is up against some stiff competition from other institutions also vying for NASA funding, Mehall said.
Those include a rover project and a proposal that would fly an airplane in the Martian atmosphere. Called SCIM, the airplane mission was developed by former ASU geology professor Laurie Leshin, who now works for NASA.
"Orbiters don't sound as exciting as airplanes or rovers, but they do serve a purpose," Mehall said. "We think this serves a niche that hasn't been explored."
The ASU Mars research team has received media attention this year for its work with THEMIS, the Thermal Emission Imaging System. THEMIS includes an infrared camera that's controlled from the ASU Mars facility.
Its Mars footage is broadcast in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and some of its photos have led to discoveries about Martian geology, Mehall said.
Christensen, for example, published a report in Nature magazine Aug. 17, explaining the appearance of dark spots and spider-shaped features on Mars using THEMIS observations.
The spots and spider features result from powerful jets of carbon dioxide gas erupting through the polar ice cap. Those jets spray dark sand in a radius hundreds of feet wide, the report said.
If ASU could launch the THOR mission, Mehall said, it would mean even more national prestige and research dollars for the University's new School of Earth and Space Exploration.
"ASU is one of the best places to do space exploration," said Christopher Edwards, a geological sciences senior. "Getting another instrument is always a good thing."
A UA proposal was selected as NASA's last Mars project, and will be NASA's first mission to Mars entirely managed by an academic institution.
Peter Smith, the principal investigator for that project, will discuss the mission at the Arizona Science Center at 12:30 p.m. Saturday.
Reach the reporter at: annalyn.censky@asu.edu.
