HR: 10:20h
AN: U11C-01 INVITED     [PDF]
TI: Mars: A Scientific Revolution in the Making?
AU: * Garvin, J B
EM: james.b.garvin@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Headquarters, Code SE, NASA HQ 300 E Street SW, Washington, DC 20546 United States
AB: The planet Mars has always been an object of fascination for scientists and the public alike, in part because of a never-ending set of enigmas it has always presented. Today, international spacecraft-based exploration of Mars has been reinvigorated, in part thanks to the discovery of meteorites bearing carbon-based molecules from Mars, as well as a consequence of the remarkable suite of discoveries made by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey orbiter missions. Indeed, in little more than the past 6 years, the underlying paradigms for how Mars has operated as a dynamic silicate planet since its time of formation have been recast, rethought, and revolutionized on the basis of the ongoing observations of the Global Surveyor and Odyssey. The current view of Mars is so rapidly evolving that one can offer only generic statements as to what is unambiguously understood. What can be said is that scientists are now viewing Mars as an inner planet for which the history of water, climate variability, and of the entire interior are complex, dynamic, and inadequately explored. A series of robotic spacecraft missions are presently enroute to the red planet in an aggressive attempt by scientists from NASA, ESA, the Japanese Space Agency, and many other international partners to re-examine the history of water, explore atmospheric loss mechanisms, explore the shallow subsurface, investigate the hydrological cycle, and even to begin exploration for the molecular building blocks of life. Because the state of scientific understanding of Mars has been changing so rapidly, it has been suggested that a scientific revolution is underway. This Union Tutorial will highlight current thinking about Mars on the eve of the most intensified robotic exploration of any planet other than the Earth's Moon, in the history of humanity. As has been said, perhaps too often, at least in terms of science, "Mars rocks".
UR: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov
DE: 5464 Remote sensing
DE: 6207 Comparative planetology
DE: 6225 Mars
SC: U
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting