Gizmorama - January 5, 2015

Good Morning,

It appears that students at Southampton University in England want to grow lettuce on Mars. What? The lengths you must go to get fresh vegetables.

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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* U.K. researchers plan to grow lettuce on Mars *
SOUTHAMPTON, England (UPI) - A group of students at Southampton University in England are looking to grow lettuce on Mars. The researchers -- a combination of undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students -- are currently lobbying for their lettuce-growing experiment to be included on the Mars One lander payload.

Mars One is a Netherlands-based non-profit organization with plans to establish a permanent human colony on Mars by 2025, beating NASA's current aim to send astronauts to Mars by more than a decade. The mission includes plans to launch of a series of unmanned exploratory and supply missions ahead of time. Any lettuce growing apparatuses would be included on the 2018 launch of the Mars One lander.

The lettuce experiment would see seeds frozen for a multi-week trip to the Red Planet. Once on the Martian surface, the lettuce seeds would be grown inside an inflatable greenhouse that would maintain a constant temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Researchers working on the #LettuceOnMars project recently fielded questions as part of a Reddit AMA. Reddit users grilled researchers on the risks entailed by introducing foreign organisms to the planet.

The students did their best to explain the precautions they will take to ensure the Red Planet remains uncontaminated.

"First, we will use a lab strain of lettuce that is as clean as it gets," project leaders wrote. "Then we will sterilize all equipment including the surface of the seeds, so the greenhouse will be as virus free as it gets."

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have previously cultivated lettuce. The greens have been grown in Mars-like conditions on Earth as part of experiments at space agency labs.

Mars One has been fiercely criticized by a range of space experts and former astronauts.

"Even ignoring the potential mismatch between the project income and its costs and questions about its longer-term viability, the Mars One proposal does not demonstrate a sufficiently deep understanding of the problems to give real confidence that the project would be able to meet its very ambitious schedule," Chris Welch, director of Masters Programs at the International Space University, said in an interview in 2012.

Mars One estimates the cost of sending and sustaining a group of astronauts on Mars, from arrival through death, will cost some $6 billion. So far they've raised -- through donations and an IndieGoGo campaign -- roughly $600,000.


*-- Mars rover Opportunity suffering from 'amnesia' says NASA --*
WASHINGTON (UPI) - Researchers at NASA are working to improve the memory of the Mars exploration rover Opportunity after a series of glitches in recent weeks led to what officials are describing as "amnesia" within the its memory banks.

The rover relies on orbital passes from the Mars Odyssey satellite to relay communications and commands to and from NASA, but when a pass does not occur between the rover's power cycles -- a relatively frequent occurrence -- the rover fails to transfer information from its temporary RAM to its permanent flash memory. The rover's repeated attempts and fails to save data to the flash memory cause it to it reboot, essentially erasing its last set of commands received.

"Volatile memory is like the traditional RAM you have in your computer; non-volatile memory uses flash memory technology," Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.

"So now we're having these events we call 'amnesia,' which is the rover trying to use the flash memory, but it wasn't able to, so instead it uses the RAM ... it stores telemetry data in that volatile memory, but when the rover goes to sleep and wakes up again, all (the data) is gone. So that's why we call it amnesia -- it forgets what it has done."

Opportunity has been working without flash memory since earlier in December, when NASA first reported the memory problems.

"While we're operating Opportunity in that mode, we are also working on an approach to make the flash memory usable again," Callas said at the time.

"We will be sure to give this approach exhaustive reviews before implementing those changes on the rover."

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