Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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JUNE 18, 2019
How to detect life on Mars
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-life-mars.html
When MIT research scientist Christopher Carr visited a green sand beach in Hawaii at the age of 9, he probably didn't think that he'd use the little olivine crystals beneath his feet to one day search for extraterrestrial life. Carr, now the science principal investigator for the Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG) instrument being developed jointly by the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital, works to wed the worlds of biology, geology, and planetary science to help understand how life evolved in the universe.
As the science principle investigator of SETG, Carr, along with a large team of scientists and engineers, has helped develop instrumentation that could withstand radiation and detect DNA, a type of nucleic acid that carries genetic information in most living organisms, in spaceflight environments. Now, Carr and his colleagues are working to fine-tune the instrumentation to work on the red planet. To do that, the team needed to simulate the kinds of soils thought to preserve evidence of life on Mars, and for that, they needed a geologist.
Angel Mojarro, a graduate student in EAPS, was up for the task. Mojarro spent months synthesizing Martian soils that represented different regions on Mars, as established by Martian rover data.
"Turns out you can buy most of the rocks and minerals found on Mars online," Mojarro says. But not all.
"Mars analog soil" search:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mars+analog+soil&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
And that article gave me the idea for the following as a lucrative eBay opportunity for someone. Research grade moon, Mars, and asteroid soil simulants are sold here:
High-fidelity Regolith Simulants
https://sciences.ucf.edu/class/exolithlab/
$20 per kg for any type.
Sell (100 per kg) 10g filled glass vials with transparent labels listing contents for, say, $7.50 each (easily $5+ profit each) including shipping on eBay, shipped in padded envelopes via 1st class mail which is fast and cheap. $20 into $500 for not a lot of effort. You may only get one run at this before someone else figures out how you're doing this. Describe samples as being from a university lab supplying simulated regolith samples to NASA and researchers worldwide.
https://sciences.ucf.edu/class/wp-content/uploads/sites/58/2018/07/MGS-1_Small.jpg
The very technical details on the Mars simulant they sell:
Mars global simulant MGS-1: A Rocknest-based open standard for basaltic martian regolith simulants
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103518303038
The real stuff:
Using an onboard focusing process, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) aboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity created this product by merging two to eight images previously taken by the MAHLI, located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm.
Curiosity performed the merge on June 17, 2019, Sol 2439 of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, at 03:15:22 UTC. The focus motor count position was 13856. This number indicates the lens position of the first image that was merged.
The onboard focus merge is sometimes performed on images acquired the same sol as the merge, and sometimes uses pictures obtained on an earlier sol. Focus merging is a method to make a composite of images of the same target acquired at different focus positions to bring all (or, as many as possible) features into focus in a single image. Because the MAHLI focus merge is performed on Mars, it also serves as a means to reduce the number of images sent back to Earth. Each focus merge produces two images: a color, best-focus product and a black-and-white image that scientists can use to estimate focus position for each element of the best focus product. Thus, up to eight images can be merged, reducing the number of images returned to Earth to two.
Something else I don't see on eBay that should be there, but which would require much more effort to provide: nice obviously LAYERED CUBES of the K-T Boundary Layer like the one I bought on eBay years ago instead of the crappy FRAGMENTS from the UK. There are THICK deposits here in the US because of our proximity to the Chicxulub impact on the east coast of Mexico.
How to detect life on Mars
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-life-mars.html
When MIT research scientist Christopher Carr visited a green sand beach in Hawaii at the age of 9, he probably didn't think that he'd use the little olivine crystals beneath his feet to one day search for extraterrestrial life. Carr, now the science principal investigator for the Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG) instrument being developed jointly by the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital, works to wed the worlds of biology, geology, and planetary science to help understand how life evolved in the universe.
As the science principle investigator of SETG, Carr, along with a large team of scientists and engineers, has helped develop instrumentation that could withstand radiation and detect DNA, a type of nucleic acid that carries genetic information in most living organisms, in spaceflight environments. Now, Carr and his colleagues are working to fine-tune the instrumentation to work on the red planet. To do that, the team needed to simulate the kinds of soils thought to preserve evidence of life on Mars, and for that, they needed a geologist.
Angel Mojarro, a graduate student in EAPS, was up for the task. Mojarro spent months synthesizing Martian soils that represented different regions on Mars, as established by Martian rover data.
"Turns out you can buy most of the rocks and minerals found on Mars online," Mojarro says. But not all.
"Mars analog soil" search:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mars+analog+soil&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
And that article gave me the idea for the following as a lucrative eBay opportunity for someone. Research grade moon, Mars, and asteroid soil simulants are sold here:
High-fidelity Regolith Simulants
https://sciences.ucf.edu/class/exolithlab/
$20 per kg for any type.
Sell (100 per kg) 10g filled glass vials with transparent labels listing contents for, say, $7.50 each (easily $5+ profit each) including shipping on eBay, shipped in padded envelopes via 1st class mail which is fast and cheap. $20 into $500 for not a lot of effort. You may only get one run at this before someone else figures out how you're doing this. Describe samples as being from a university lab supplying simulated regolith samples to NASA and researchers worldwide.
https://sciences.ucf.edu/class/wp-content/uploads/sites/58/2018/07/MGS-1_Small.jpg
The very technical details on the Mars simulant they sell:
Mars global simulant MGS-1: A Rocknest-based open standard for basaltic martian regolith simulants
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103518303038
The real stuff:
Using an onboard focusing process, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) aboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity created this product by merging two to eight images previously taken by the MAHLI, located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm.
Curiosity performed the merge on June 17, 2019, Sol 2439 of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, at 03:15:22 UTC. The focus motor count position was 13856. This number indicates the lens position of the first image that was merged.
The onboard focus merge is sometimes performed on images acquired the same sol as the merge, and sometimes uses pictures obtained on an earlier sol. Focus merging is a method to make a composite of images of the same target acquired at different focus positions to bring all (or, as many as possible) features into focus in a single image. Because the MAHLI focus merge is performed on Mars, it also serves as a means to reduce the number of images sent back to Earth. Each focus merge produces two images: a color, best-focus product and a black-and-white image that scientists can use to estimate focus position for each element of the best focus product. Thus, up to eight images can be merged, reducing the number of images returned to Earth to two.
Something else I don't see on eBay that should be there, but which would require much more effort to provide: nice obviously LAYERED CUBES of the K-T Boundary Layer like the one I bought on eBay years ago instead of the crappy FRAGMENTS from the UK. There are THICK deposits here in the US because of our proximity to the Chicxulub impact on the east coast of Mexico.
