Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

A NEW PROBE FOR MARS
I hope you were able to see the lunar eclipse last week and for those of you who have been unable to find the full moon-sized Mars in the sky, I hate to disappoint you, but those e-mails you get don’t always tell the truth.  If Mars close enough to Earth to be the size of the full Moon, the resulting earthquakes would destroy all life on the planet.

But Mars is bright and easy to spot in the early morning sky.  Just look straight up at around 5:30 a.m. and you’ll see a bright red ‘star’.  That’s not a star; it’s Mars.  We reach our closest point of approach to our red neighbor every two years and our two-year minimum will be this November.
NASA always launches spacecraft bound for Mars during this period and last month the Phoenix spacecraft headed out for Mars.  This one carries a lander and it’s aimed at the northern polar region.  Although we’ve attempted landers close to the poles before, they’ve always failed.  Here’s hoping we have more luck with Phoenix.

Phoenix will be the first mission to touch water ice on Mars.  Its robotic arm will dig to an icy layer believed to lie just beneath the surface near the Martian north pole.  The mission will study the history of the water in the ice, monitor weather of the polar region, and investigate whether the subsurface environment in the far-northern plains of Mars has ever been favorable for sustaining microbial life. Phoenix uses the main body of a lander originally made for a 2001 mission that was cancelled before launch.  Samples of soil and ice collected by the lander's robotic arm will be analyzed by instruments mounted on the deck.  Like the Viking landers, the first ever on Mars, instruments will check for water and carbon-containing compounds by heating soil samples in tiny ovens and examining the vapors that are given off.  Another instrument will test soil samples by adding water and analyzing the molecules that dissolve from the soil.

The Phoenix spacecraft launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard a Delta II rocket. (Credit: NASA)

Cameras and microscopes will provide information on scales spanning 10 powers of 10, from features that could fit by the hundreds into a period at the end of a sentence to an aerial view taken during descent.  A weather station will provide information about atmospheric processes in the arctic region.  Additional information on Phoenix is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix .

THE BRIGHTEST FLASH?
Meanwhile back on Earth, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have generated extremely short pulses of light that are the strongest of their type ever produced.  They have such high-intensity, that they may prove invaluable in probing the ultra-fast motion of atoms and electrons.  The light pulses used were in the terahertz (THz) range of the electromagnetic spectrum.  These frequencies are longer than infrared radiation and shorter than microwaves.  Scientists send tight bunches of electrons at nearly the speed of light through a magnetic field to produce THz radiation at a trillion cycles per second - the terahertz frequency that gives the light its name and that makes these flashes especially valuable for investigating biological molecules and imaging, ranging from tumor detection to homeland security.
	Lead author Yuzhen Shen (left) and NSLS researcher Larry Carr. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory)

The Brookhaven team is looking to expand the potential uses for this type of light by increasing the strength of individual THz pulses, a longtime goal for scientists in the field.  By slamming an electron beam from an accelerator into an aluminum mirror, the researchers produced 100 megawatt single-cycle pulses - the highest energy ever achieved to date with THz radiation.  For comparison, 100 megawatts is about the output of a utility company's electrical generator.

The strength of the pulses plus their ultra-fast nature provides researchers with a powerful new tool to study the movement of a material's electrons (which zip around at the femtosecond, or quadrillionth of a second, timescale) or atoms (which move at the picosecond, or trillionth of a second, timescale).  A picture of an atom frozen in place coming soon from the researchers at Brookhaven Institute.

	THE WONDERS OF NATURAL GLASS
	Scientists have recently discovered fragile relics from the distant past.  Thirty miles off the coast of Washington state, marine scientists have discovered large colonies of glass sponges thriving on the seafloor.  Glass sponges are rare but these are unique.  Glass sponges were once the prime reef builders of the early Earth, but the species of glass sponges capable of building reefs were thought extinct for 100 million years until they were found in recent years in the protected waters of Canada's Georgia and Hecata straits, the only place in the world they've been observed until now.  The discovery in Washington waters extends the range of reef-building glass sponges into open ocean.
This image depicts only a tiny part of a reef in Canadian waters that stretches miles in length. (Credit: University of Victoria)

The sponge reefs could be important to the ecosystems on the Washington coast because they create a thriving oasis dense with sea life on seafloor that is otherwise sparely populated for miles.  The glass sponge reefs were alive with zooplankton, sardines, crabs, prawns and rockfish.

One of the scientists aboard the expedition that discovered the reefs said, "It's like looking at an overcrowded aquarium in an expensive Japanese restaurant."

The Washington sponge reefs are each hundreds of feet in length and width and it's possible that the state has reefs comparable to the Canadian reefs that are miles in length.

The glass sponges -- so-called because their skeletons are made of silica (the same material as beach sand) -- come in un-sponge-like shapes similar to cups and funnels.  They range in color from creamy white to brilliant hues of yellow.  The reefs build upward as new generations of sponges grow atop the still-hard silica skeletons of previous generations.  The reefs just discovered are in 650 feet of water and rise between 6 and 15 feet above the seafloor.  The sponges on the mounds grow as tall as 1½ feet.

The reef-building sponge species had their heyday 150 million years ago when ocean conditions allowed them to grown near the surface of the ocean.  Their fossilized remains, for example, are found in outcrops that are hundreds of miles long on land throughout Europe, all sites that were underwater in the late Jurassic period.  It was thought the reef-building glass sponges were all driven to extinction 100 million years ago when diatoms, single-celled algae that also require silica dissolved in seawater, evolved in the global oceans and began using up the silica needed by the reef-building glass sponges.
So here’s to living glass and to the glory of new discoveries!

A British scientist has recently repeated his assertion that an Indonesian mud volcano was almost certainly manmade despite a new study claiming the eruption might have been triggered by an earthquake. Professor Richard Davies of Durham University's Centre for Research into Earth Energy Systems said the volcano, known locally as Lusi, was most likely caused by the drilling of a nearby exploratory borehole to find natural gas. He reiterated the findings of a Durham University-led study, first published in the February issue of US Journal GSA Today, following publication of a new paper led by the University of Oslo which said the eruption in May 2006 might have been caused by an earthquake that occurred two days earlier. Dr. Davies said: "There were several problems with the exploration well prior to the eruption of the mud volcano, but it was when they started to pull the drill bit out of the hole that they probably sucked gas and water into the wellbore. "We have calculated that a water or gas influx would have caused a critical increase in the pressure in the hole, sufficient to fracture the rock strata underground.  It is very unlikely that the Yoyakarta earthquake had a significant role to play in the development of the mud volcano.”	LUSI PUMPS ON
	Mud volcano. (Credit: Image courtesy of Durham University)

Lusi first erupted on May 29 2006 in the Porong sub-district of Sidoarjo in Eastern Java, close to Indonesia's second city of Surabaya.  The volcano has continued to spew out an estimated 5 MILLION cubic feet of mud every day and the mud now covers an area of 4 square miles.

Around 20,000 to 30,000 people have lost their homes and factories have been destroyed. Thirteen people have also died as a result of a rupture in a natural gas pipeline that lay underneath one of the holding dams built to retain the mud.

From Mars probes to light probes and from to glass to mud.  Where else can you get such a wide range of science topics?