Remote Nanoimaging on Mars - Results of the Atomic Force Microscope Onboard NASA's Phoenix Mission

Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, August 7-August 11, 201

Mars sample return – a proposed mission campaign whose time is now

The analysis in Earth laboratories of samples that could be returned from Mars is of extremely high interest to the international Mars exploration community. IMEWG (the International Mars Exploration Working Group) has been evaluating options, by means of a working group referred to as iMOST, to refine the scientific objectives of MSR. The Mars 2020 sample-caching rover mission is the first component of the Mars Sample Return campaign, so its existence constitutes a critical opportunity. Finally, on April 26, 2018, NASA and ESA signed a Statement of Intent to work together to formulate, by the end of 2019, a joint plan for the retrieval missions that are essential to the completion of the MSR Campaign. All of these converged April 25-27, 2018 in Berlin, Germany, at the 2nd International Mars Sample Return Conference

Insects: a protein-rich feed ingredient in pig and poultry diets

The use of insects as a sustainable protein-rich feed ingredient inpig and poultry diets is technically feasible. Insects can turn lowgradebiowaste into proteins.• The amino acid profile of yellow mealworm, common housefly,and black soldier fly is close to the profile of soybean meal withmethionine or methionine + cystine, which are generally the mostlimiting essential amino acids for growing pigs and broilers. Argininecan also become a limiting essential amino acid for broilersfed housefly pupae and mealworm.• Additional research is recommended on digestibility of (processed)insects, inclusion levels in poultry and pig diets, functionalproperties, safety when using biowaste as a rearing substrate,extraction of nutrients, shelf life, and use of left-over substratesand residue products of insects.• To compete with conventional protein sources and become aninteresting link in the animal feed chain to fulfil the globally increasingdemand for protein, cost price of insect production andprocessing should be further reduced

Mars sample return – a proposed mission campaign whose time is now

The analysis in Earth laboratories of samples that could be returned from Mars is of extremely high interest to the international Mars exploration community. IMEWG (the International Mars Exploration Working Group) has been evaluating options, by means of a working group referred to as iMOST, to refine the scientific objectives of MSR. The Mars 2020 sample-caching rover mission is the first component of the Mars Sample Return campaign, so its existence constitutes a critical opportunity. Finally, on April 26, 2018, NASA and ESA signed a Statement of Intent to work together to formulate, by the end of 2019, a joint plan for the retrieval missions that are essential to the completion of the MSR Campaign. All of these converged April 25-27, 2018 in Berlin, Germany, at the 2nd International Mars Sample Return Conference

AN EFFICIENT ALGORITHM FOR CLUSTERING NODES, CLASSIFYING AND REPLICATION OF CONTENT ON DEMAND BASIS FOR CONTENT DISTRIBUTION IN P2P OVERLAY NETWORKS

This paper proposes an efficient algorithm for clustering nodes, classifying and replication of content on demand basis for content distribution in p2p overlay networks. Peer-to-peer overlay networks are a good solution for distributed computing than client-server model since nodes in P2P networks act both as client and server. With such functionality of managing replicas is an astonishing task and we designed an architecture for content distribution. In the proposed architecture, nodes are grouped into strong, medium and weak clusters based on their weight vector. More copies of Class I content are replicated in strong clusters that are having high weight values. Class II and Class III clusters consumes medium and low queries. Routing is performed hierarchically by broadcasting the query to the strong clusters first, then to medium clusters and finally to weak clusters. From extensive simulations using NS2 simulator, the proposed architecture achieves less bandwidth consumption, reduced latency, reduced maintenance cost, strong connectivity and query coverage

AFM investigation of Martian soil simulants on micromachined Si substrates

The micro and nanostructures of Martian soil simulants with particles in the micrometre-size range have been studied using a combination of optical and atomic force microscopy (AFM) in preparation for the 2007 NASA Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The operation of an atomic force microscope on samples of micrometre-sized soil particles is a poorly investigated area where the unwanted interaction between the scanning tip and loose particles results in poor image quality and tip contamination by the sample. In order to mitigate these effects, etched silicon substrates with a variety of features have been used to facilitate the sorting and gripping of particles. From these experiments, a number of patterns were identified that were particularly good at isolating and immobilizing particles for AFM imaging. This data was used to guide the design of micromachined substrates for the Phoenix AFM. Both individual particles as well as aggregates were successfully imaged, and information on sizes, shapes and surface morphologies were obtained. This study highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of AFM for the potential in situ investigation of Martian soil and dust. Also presented are more general findings of the limiting operational constraints that exist when attempting the AFM of high aspect ratio particles with current technology. The performance of the final designs of the substrates incorporated on Phoenix will be described in a later paper. © 2007 The Authors