We know for sure that Mars had a magnetic field: satellites have detected a residual field induced by the rocks of its crust. Therefore we wish to carry out an experiment about the magnetic properties of rocks in the Utah desert. The goal would be to determine as much as possible about the magnetic field that existed back when the rock was formed.
The goal of the project is to calculate the redshift by observing objects outside our galaxy. To be able to do this, we will connect a spectroscope CDD to the MDRS telescope.
First, we will be able to the determine if the objects we observe are going further away from us or coming closer. Then we will measure the redshift and afterwards redtermine how the expansion of the Universe theory and Hubble law were deduced.
The previous crews from UCL (crew 127 and 136) began a project with the objective of establishing a model of the past flow for a dry streambed as the conditions would be really close to the ones encountered on Mars and could provide interesting observations. Encouraging results have been found last year and a publication on this subject has been made. This year, we plan to improve the results by working in three different directions: establishing the regime of the river, doing a sediment transport model and finally completing the result by making a statistical analysis instead of a deterministic study.
Our project is to design an experiment to find out any bacterial life in rocks from the Utah desert, to grow it in culture, and to characterize it by a range of phenotypic and biochemical tests applicable in Martian conditions. We should be able to run these tests with very few equipment. Given that a drilling project is not conceivable, we should just focus on surface rocks from various places, such as an old river’s bed, to discover bacterial presence