July 2008

• Extraterrestrial Terraforming Starts With Bacteria, Wired
• NASA ROSES-08 Amendment 22: New ROSES Dues Dates for Program Elements impacted by the unplanned unavailability of NSPIRES, NASA
• Ancient Footprints in the Salt, NASA
• Life, the Universe and Everything: Ask an Astrobiologist, Wired
• Coupling convectively driven atmospheric circulation to surface rotation: Evidence for active methane weather in the observed spin rate drift of Titan, astro-ph
• Searching for the secondary eclipse of CoRoT-Exo-2b and its transit timing variations, astro-ph
• TEST - The Tautenburg Exoplanet Search Telescope, astro-ph

• Habitable Climates: The Influence of Obliquity, astro-ph
• Extrasolar Planet Eccentricities from Scattering in the Presence of Residual Gas Disks, astro-ph
• The Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems: Description of the Spitzer Legacy Science Database, astro-ph
• Disk Truncation and Planet Formation in gamma Cephei, astro-ph

• Deep L' and M-band Imaging for Planets Around Vega and epsilon Eridani, astro-ph
• Precise Astrometry of Visual Binaries with Adaptive Optics. A Way for Finding Exoplanets?, astro-ph

• The Distribution, Excitation and Formation of Cometary Molecules: Methanol, Methyl Cyanide and Ethylene Glycol, astro-ph

• Transiting exoplanets from the CoRoT space mission V. CoRoT-Exo-4b: Stellar and planetary parameters, astro-ph
• Photoevaporation of Protoplanetary Disks, astro-ph
• New M dwarf debris disk candidates in NGC 2547, astro-ph

POC: Craig Moore, 256-544-7585, Craig.E.Moore@nasa.gov

The Marshall Space Flight Center is sponsoring a Space Sensors and Measurement Techniques workshop in August to discuss new technologies for sensor development. The two-day workshop will be held Aug. 5-6, 2008, at the Nashville Doubletree Hotel, Nashville, Tenn.

Please join us as this year's students present the results of their summer's research. The 2008 Summer Undergraduate Internship in Astrobiology is a ten-week internship in astrobiology held each year at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2008 11am Pacific

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Stand Alone Missions of Opportunity Notice (SALMON), is intended to provide opportunities for science and technology investigations on space flight missions that advance the high priority science, technology, and exploration objectives of NASA's four Mission Directorates. This five-year omnibus Announcement of Opportunity (AO) incorporates Program Element Appendices (PEAs) for general Mission of Opportunity (MO) proposal opportunities as well as focused proposal opportunities for specific flight opportunities.

This amendment announces a new proposal opportunity in Appendix E.7 entitled "Concept Studies for Human Tended Suborbital Science". NASA recognizes the advancement of the commercial spaceflight industry and the potential for human-tended suborbital flight experiments enabled by this capability. The imminent emergence of human suborbital flight for commercial purposes offers an opportunity for a new mode of research for the scientific community: human-tended suborbital investigations for cases where having a human in-the-loop would increase the scientific return of flight experiments.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issues this DRAFT Standard PI-led Mission Announcement of Opportunity (AO) to solicit community comments.

This DRAFT Standard PI-led Mission AO represents a restructuring of previous NASA AOs for PI-led missions (e.g., 2006 Discovery Program AO, 2006 Mars Scout Program AO, 2007 Small Explorer Program AO). It is the product of an effort by NASA (the "AO Simplification Team") to simplify and remove burden from the community in generating Step 1 proposals that respond to AOs. The AO Simplification effort has solicited comments from the proposing, evaluating, and implementing communities. There have been several community announcements, town halls at science conferences, and community workshops to discuss the pros and cons of AO Simplification and specific ideas with the community. The AO Simplification Team has received over 700 specific suggestions from the community and has considered all of them. A White Paper has been developed by the AO Simplification Team that captures the rationale for many of the decisions that were made in writing the DRAFT Standard PI-led Mission AO. That White Paper will be posted on the same NSPIRES website as this DRAFT AO.

This amendment announces a new proposal opportunity in Appendix D.9 entitled "Kepler Guest Observer - Cycle 1." This program element solicits proposals for the acquisition and analysis of new scientific data from the Kepler mission, which will be the tenth mission to be launched under NASA's Discovery Program. Observations associated with the Kepler Guest Observer -- Cycle 1 solicitation will begin immediately following the successful scientific commissioning of the spacecraft. During its 3.5-year prime mission, Kepler will continuously monitor a ~100 square degree field-of-view (FOV) in the Cygnus region, with the objective of photometrically detecting transits of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone. The instrument's high-precision photometry capability, with two available cadence modes (1 minute and 30-minute) is also sufficient for asteroseismology research and other variability analyses of both Galactic and extragalactic sources.

The NASA Astrobiology Institute is pleased to announce the selection of 18 proposals for support through the 2008 NAI Director's Discretionary Fund. These awards allocate more than $1.4M toward strategic investments that advance the science of astrobiology, demonstrate impact to NASA's space flight programs or its broader science activities, and/or contribute to NASA's role as a federal R&D agency. The members of the Institute, in collaboration with members of the larger astrobiology community, responded to this year's DDF Call for Proposals with a bold, interdisciplinary, and focused set of proposals.

• Color Gradients Detected in the HD 15115 Circumstellar Disk, astro-ph
• Search for Alien Life Gains New Impetus, Washington Post
• Barely Alive, Seafloor Microbes Might Resemble Exo-Organisms, Wired
• Microbes beneath sea floor genetically distinct, Penn State

• Tunguska catastrophe: Evidence of acid rain supports meteorite theory, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres
• Phoenix Mars Lander Rasps Frozen Layer, Collects Sample, NASA
• NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander to Begin Rasping Frozen Layer, NASA
• New Findings Show Diverse, Wet Environments on Ancient Mars, Jons Hopkins University
• Wavefront error correction and Earth-like planet detection by Self-Coherent Camera in space, astro-ph
• Planetpol polarimetry of the exoplanet systems 55 Cnc and tau Boo, astro-ph

Editor's note: Three live webcams are now online at the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station on Devon Island: Webcam 1 |Webcam 2 | Webcam 3

Today's video: Charles Cockell from Open University talks about polar geomicrobiology at Trinity Lake on Devon Island (below)

• On the complementarity of astrometric and radial velocity exoplanet observations - Determining exoplanet mass with astrometric snapshots, astro-ph
• Transits and secondary eclipses of HD 189733 with Spitzer, astro-ph
• Signals from an Infant Earth, Astrobiology Magazine

• Towards the Albedo of an Exoplanet: MOST Satellite Observations of Bright Transiting Exoplanetary Systems, astro-ph

• Cloudy Atmosphere of the Extra-solar Planet HD189733b : A Possible Explanation of the Detected B-band Polarization, astro-ph
• Evaporation of extrasolar planets, astro-ph
• Accretion and destruction of planetesimals in turbulent disks, astro-ph
• High Spatial Resolution Mid-IR Imaging of V838 Monocerotis: Evidence of New Circumstellar Dust Creation, astro-ph

• Hot super-Earths could host life after all, New Scientist

• Determination of stellar, orbital and planetary parameters using complete Monte-Carlo analysis -- the case of HAT-P-7b, astro-ph
• Reflected light from 3D exoplanetary atmospheres and simulation of HD 209458b, astro-ph
• Overview of the SIM PlanetQuest Light (SIM-Lite) mission concept, astro-ph

• Toward detection of terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of our closest neighbor: Proxima Centauri, astro-ph
• An interferometric study of the low-mass protostar IRAS 16293-2422: small scale organic chemistry, astro-ph

• The MEarth project: searching for transiting habitable super-Earths around nearby M-dwarfs, astro-ph
• Induced Kozai Migration and Formation of Close-in Planets in Binaries, astro-ph
• Stable chaos in the 55Cnc exoplanetary system?, astro-ph
• Dynamics of small bodies in planetary systems, astro-ph
• Extrasolar Giant Planets and X-ray Activity, astro-ph

• Deep-sea Discoveries on Expedition Using NASA Astrobiology ASTEP AUVs, astro-ph
• The Impact of Transiting Planet Science on the Next Generation of Direct-Imaging Planet Searches, astro-ph
• Long-Term Evolution in Transit Duration of Extrasolar Planets from Magnetic Activity in their Parent Stars, astro-ph
• Organic Matter in Space - an Overview, astro-ph
• Searching for transit timing variations in transiting exoplanet systems, astro-ph
• Time-dependent CO depletion during the formation of protoplanetary disks, astro-ph

• Explosive volcanism on the ultraslow-spreading Gakkel ridge, Arctic Ocean, Nature
• Open clusters like Orion have low fertility rate, University of California Berkeley
• Fifteen students launch into space research internship at National Space Biomedical Research Institute

The European Workshop on Astrobiology will be held in Neuchatel, Switzerland, from 1 to 3 September. The event is organised by the European Astrobiology Network Association (EANA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Space Exploration Institute Neuchatel. In a number of sessions, the main topics of astrobiology are on the agenda, including:

• SuperLupus: A Deep, Long Duration Transit Survey, astro-ph
• Measurements of Stellar Properties through Asteroseismology: A Tool for Planet Transit Studies, astro-ph
• Identifying Transiting Circumbinary Planets, astro-ph
• Collisional and Thermal Emission Models of Debris Disks: Towards Planetesimal Population Properties, astro-ph
• Type II Migration: Varying Planet Mass and Disc Viscosity, astro-ph

• Transit Detection of Radial Velocity Planets, astro-ph
• Transiting Planets - Lightcurve Analysis for Eccentric Orbits, astro-ph
• Laboratory evidence for efficient water formation in interstellar ices, astro-ph
• Did newborn Earth harbour life?, New Scientist
• Aussie diamonds a clue to life birth, The Australian

• 'Brain breathalysers' may scan astronauts for stress, New Scientist

• Direct Detection of the Close Companion of Polaris with the Hubble Space Telescope, astro-ph
• GD 552: a cataclysmic variable with a brown dwarf companion?, astro-ph