Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - 10 Years A Roving: A.J.S. Rayl on the Mars Exploration Rovers

Episode Date: December 23, 2013

What a long, wonderful trip it has been for Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rovers. Planetary Society reporter A.J.S. Rayl has been writing about their adventure every month for ten years. She looks back on this week’s show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, podcast listeners, a big happy holidays from all of us at the Planetary Society. Thank you for a year of listening to the show. It has been a terrific year. Nobody has had a better time doing this than me. I did want to catch you before the end of the year and have a gift for you in exchange for this, having to listen to this special message. We'll get to that in a moment. Just make an appeal one more time, because if you make your donation in support of this radio show, Planetary Radio, at planetary.org slash radio,

you can get the tax benefits in 2013, because, of course, your contributions to the Planetary Society should be tax-deductible. And we can certainly use the support. Anything over $50, what a deal. We will give you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Thanks so much. Now that gift, well, the people who only hear us on the radio will only hear about 12 minutes of my conversation with our guest today.

You folks will get to hear a 34-minute fascinating conversation, I think so anyway, hope you'll agree, about the Mars Exploration Rovers. Some stuff that you probably have not heard about them because our guest, Sally Rail, has been a real mission insider as she writes about it for the Planetary Society. So without further ado, everybody have a wonderful, wonderful time, and here's the show. Ten years of roving Mars, this week on Planetary Radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We are days away from an anniversary no one on Earth would have believed possible. It was nearly 10 years ago that Spirit, the first of the Mars exploration rovers, bounced down onto the red planet. Her sister, Opportunity, is still up there, roving and exploring. We'll talk with my colleague Sally Rayl, who has been immersed in this amazing mission right from the start. The rest of the gang is also here, beginning with planetary evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, I know how very much you hate to pick favorites, especially single most favorites, whether it's an image or a story.

Nevertheless, that's what I'm going to ask you to do on this show that will be the last of a lot of people here in 2013. It does seem like the Chinese may have given us a pretty good candidate just in the last few days. Would you agree? Yeah, I have to say that as much as I hate picking favorites, the choice this year is not particularly difficult. We are finally back on the surface of the moon after 37 years. And not only that, it's with a robotic rover as well as a lander that can take pictures

of each other, which is just tremendous. Not only that, but it's a new nation in terms of planetary exploration. It's China, which has certainly been doing some space exploration in the past. There's been a couple of lunar orbiters and a human program. But really, this represents a lot of possibility, a lot of new beginnings. It's been a couple of lunar orbiters and a human program. But really, this represents a lot of possibility, a lot of new beginnings. It's the beginning of what may be quite a long mission, at least three months. But so far, they're talking about the rover and lander likely lasting longer than planned. And it could be the start of a wonderful new era of Chinese robotic exploration of the solar system. So I can't wait to see what unfolds in the next year. Yeah, this story certainly works on many levels. You know, I was going to ask you about

that. Are we looking at 90 days or 10 years for this new rover? I think the answer is going to be somewhere in between. I don't expect it to last 10 years because the problem with the moon is that the thermal extremes are just so great. Even during the lunar day, you have temperatures much higher in the sunlight than in the shade. And metal constructed items, they do not like those kinds of extremes. It bends and warps materials over and over and over again

as the temperature cycles from hot to cold and back again. So I do not expect this mission to last 10 years. However, I expect it to last several months right through a bunch of 2014. And I'll enjoy all the pictures that I see from it. Not like that friendly environment that we have on Mars. Tell me about some of your other highlights in the few moments we have left. Well, speaking of other nations doing planetary exploration, we've got India having launched its first interplanetary spacecraft. They haven't gotten to Mars yet.

There's a lot of work they have to do to make this a success in 2014. But still, it's a grand start. And then, of course, there was the tremendous visitor that the sun got from deep space, and that was comet ISON. I know that ISON's performance was a disappointment to many people. It didn't wind up showing up in the night sky to be visible to the naked eye. But it was a tremendous thing to watch with solar observing spacecraft around the world on Thanksgiving Day as it rounded the sun. Would you put those plumes on Europa in this group? I almost forgot. There's been so much in the last month. Plumes on Europa, yes, that's tremendous, just like Enceladus. Maybe or maybe not. Further study is required.

So we're going to have to, hopefully, 2014, we'll see Hubble verify this claim of plumes on Europa and maybe a new resurgence of interest in launching a mission to go explore them. A big year, 2013, especially at the end. Let's hope that 2014 brings us many more highlights and even a few surprises. Thanks, Emily. Hear, hear, Matt. Senior Editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist. She is also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

That's Emily Lakdawalla, and we will be talking to her again throughout 2014. Up next is Bill Nye. Bill, since this is likely the last show we're doing in 2013 that will be heard by people in 2013. I thought I would ask you what I've asked Emily for your favorite space story of the year. Oh, for me, it's Chelyabinsk, the airburst over Russia, where the Earth got hit with an object that was small enough to explode in the sky and just send a thousand people to the hospital. But if it were much bigger, just a little bit bigger, it would be super trouble.

I mean we'd have thousands, maybe millions of deaths, and it would change the course of human history. No big deal. So although nothing happened or hardly anything happened, this is a harbinger. This is something we should all be aware of and concerned with, and I'm talking about everybody around the world. We're going to need the space agencies of the entire world. We're going to need the efforts of the whole species to keep the Earth from getting hit with one of these things and ending the world.

It's an exciting time because we can do something about it. We as a species. And this would be, for me, the most important thing humans should be doing in space. Okay, so that's 2013. Even though it looks forward to what needs to be done in the future, is there anything else in the years to come that you would like to see as the most important story of some year in the not-too-distant future? Well, let's keep in mind, Matt, I went to Cape Canaveral for the launch of MAVEN. I did the videos for Juno, the mission on the way to Jupiter,

and the mission New Horizons is going to take up close or pretty up close pictures of Pluto, the first of the Plutoids, the last of the former traditional planet. Anyway, all that's great. But I want to get people on Mars. I want to put humans on Mars looking for life. Now, this means, first of all, developing the technology, getting everybody in the world excited about it, thinking it's worth doing. But it also means taking a meeting, if I may, with the planetary protection people. We just all got to agree that Mars is a pretty sterile place to start with. But we got to find out if there's anything alive there and reach an agreement, a way to satisfy as many people as possible

in that regard. It's exciting. Deflecting an asteroid and putting people on Mars, those are the two things I think humankind should be working on in the coming years, if I may, along with everything else. Worthy of our, certainly of my enthusiasm, Bill, I join you in this. Thank you so much. Looking forward to 2014. We're going to change the world.

Happy New Year, Bill. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here on the radio show. Back in a moment to talk about 10 years of Mars exploration Rovers on the Red Planet. How could anyone not be immensely proud of the Mars Exploration Rovers? As they approach their 10th anniversary on the Red Planet, the Planetary Society is just one organization that we'll be celebrating. Joining us will be Sally Rail. Sally has been embedded in the adventures of Spirit and Opportunity since before their launches, back when few observers thought they had a chance of making it to Mars.

You'll know Sally as AJS Rail if you've read her superb monthly accounts of the mission at planetary.org. This author, journalist, and entrepreneur has also covered the rovers for Discover and Reader's Digest. You may have seen her byline in other publications ranging from Wired to People magazine. We talked by phone a few days ago about this mission she loves. I'm happy to present our fascinating more than half-hour conversation in this podcast version of the show. Sally, what a pleasure to see you around the office, but to finally now get to have this conversation. I've been reading your magnificent accounts of this mission for more than 10 years, and now you've brought together so many of your greatest impressions

of what it has left not just you with, but all of human civilization with, in this article that's in the Planetary Report, the new issue of TPR that goes out to Planetary Society members. We're not going to be able to capture everything here, obviously, but thank you for taking the time to recount some of these tales. Thank you, Matt. It's a pleasure to be here. As I have it, this draft of the article, it says, The Magic of Mir, One Decade of Roving Mars. Talk to us about this magic. What has made this mission, these two spacecraft, magical? The magic I'm talking about lies in the miracles. I've long

called it the miracle mission to Mars, but I just want to be clear here. Spirit and opportunity didn't part the Red Sea on Mars, and Steve Squires hasn't raised the dead, except, of course, ancient, one might say, dead paleoenvironments. Yeah. But I'm talking about the kinds of happenings, you know, the events in the business of space that are considered miracles because space exploration is still extremely difficult, especially landing on and operating on another planet as harsh as Mars for a decade with no real margin for error. Just standing back by almost anybody's account, that's a miracle.

Yeah, you think? Moderately difficult? Just a little. I mean, no one goes into space alone, so that's also a saying within the community. And it does take the miracle, in this case, of thousands of people doing their absolute best during the creation phase, and hundreds of people during the operations phase to commit the time and the continued effort to keep things rolling on the surface. I mean, this isn't just like somebody gets behind a screen and does a joystick trip, right? This has been day in and day out for the MIR Ops team for 10 years. The world has gone on to children have been born. Jennifer Trosper, one of the original mission managers, actually had a baby, was pregnant at the time of landings,

and that child is now 10 years old. We've lost really valued and much loved team members. One of the original members of the design team, Jake Mateijevich, Ron Greeley, who was at Arizona State University and a mentor to so many people. Life has gone on, and yet every day, so too have these rovers. And for you too. I mean, when this started, didn't you think this was going to be a fairly short gig? Yeah. Yeah, I actually had covering a space mission as a journalist from beginning to end was a bucket list for me. It was a bucket list item. And I'd covered Voyager, but of course, I'm too young to have covered it from the very beginning as a journalist. And look at Ed Stone, isn't that amazing that he's the original project scientist and still going there? But anyway,

Voyager was not an opportunity for me. I covered Galileo, but even that was 19 years until it got to the probe insertion at Jupiter. I just wanted to cover a mission beginning to end. This looked like six months, a year outside. I thought, great. Rover's great. Mars, better, right? Yeah, it seemed easy. I don't think there's another journalist who has been as immersed in this mission, maybe in any mission. There may not be another journalist crazy enough to do what I've done, actually. But the other thing, too, is having the opportunity to do that. And really, Planetary Society has given me that home where I can consistently report on this to the length that I want. You'll never hear a complaint about the length from me.

Begin to speak about some of these miracles which add up to the magic of this mission. Yes, and it's where does one start with this? Getting to the Cape was the first major miracle. And when I talked with Steve Squires recently in reflecting on these first 10 years, and this is mentioned in the planetary report feature, what comes to his mind in the still of the night, as I like to say, is not the fact that they've had 10 years on Mars. That's amazing. Everybody will say that's amazing. That's not what he thinks about. What he thinks about are all those years, all that effort by thousands of people just to make sure this thing happened.

4,000 people, I believe, Steve named in one of the appendices in his book. You really don't go into space alone. The magic in that is that every person, no matter what widget, no matter what bolt, no matter what wire, what instrument they were in charge of, really had to be doing their absolute best because we're talking about operating a spacecraft, a rover on Mars, right? This is not just the Earth. So engineers being engineers, nobody wants to be an engineer or be on the team to create the first widget or instrument or port that breaks first. But it does take everybody to get on the same page with that. And the magic, there's so many things that are magic. Getting to the Cape was the first miracle. Even when this mission got the green light, there were still challenges being handed down by none other than

NASA HQ, stuff that really caught Steve by surprise. MER was selected for flight in July 2000, and at that point, the odds were clearly stacked against it. Two-thirds of Mars missions, for example, ended in failure. Mars Odyssey made it into orbit in 2001, but Mir was a landed rover, and that's as risky as a mission could be. Crazier still, I mean, this project really only had three years to go from blueprints to the Cape, to being buttoned up and ready for launch at the Cape. Less than three years. That's crazy. And then, ready for launch at the Cape, less than three years. That's crazy. And then just a few weeks after NASA gave it the green light, it was a hot August afternoon, as Steve Squires remembers it, the phone was ringing in his office and he picks up the phone. And it turns out to be the guys in

the Mars program office at NASA headquarters. And they want to know, can you do two? And so Squire says to me, I swear to God, I said, two what? And that's how overnight a single rover became twins. Amazing. As if they didn't have enough of a challenge on their plate. Right. And all within three years. So it really is, it's a miracle. It's a miracle that they got to the Cape.

And at the end of the day, I think the fundamental reason for all of that is that they believed in themselves. Everybody on this team, they believed in the work they did, and they believed in their rovers. They had to use the Pathfinder landing system and the same type of spacecraft as they did for Little Sojourner, you know, and get them onto the surface with the same sort of bouncing down protected by airbags method that Pathfinder used in 97. But Spirit and Opportunity, they're the size of golf carts, right? During the testing, parachutes shredded, airbags exploded. No one, I mean, no one, to my memory, nobody believed that they were even going to make it. And you're talking, well, maybe they'll get one down, you know, maybe one will get down,

but there's no way they're both going to get down. There was skepticism followed them around like dark little dust devils. And I remember a lot of this pessimism, even from people who were in a position of leadership within NASA? Had really big doubts. I mean, in a way, it's a miracle that this mission happened at all. And it was funded in a very unique and different way, which is sort of how it is also magical. Getting to the Cape, to cut back to that, they passed every review, internal and external. And according to JPL director Charles Elachi, the rovers went through more internal and external reviews than any other spacecraft, and yet trouble

followed them right to the cape. Even as Spirit was on the launch pad, there was a possibility the mission might be aborted because they had to open up opportunity and exchange out an electronics board. It should have been a standard, easy-to-do procedure, and it was, except that a pyro went off, and that suddenly alerted an engineer that possibly there was a failure within the pyro system electronics. And for anybody who doesn't recognize that, a pyro for pyrotechnic, these things that are needed to cut cables and burst bolts, and they're little explosives, so you might want to be concerned. Right. And so they had to then launch on what basically became a greatest race across the country to find every single pyro that had ever been tested, that had ever been fired. Steve describes this in

exhilarating detail in his book, Roving Mars, so I will refer people to that. But at the end of the day, with the Spirit waiting to go on the launch pad, they were able to exonerate the pyrotechnic electronic system and go for launch. But right up to the very last second, it was just a miracle. And then they had to get to Mars. They happened to encounter the most powerful solar flare on record. But somehow they shook it off and they continued on. And then, of course, there was landing. One could argue that each of those landings was a miracle, right? Yeah.

Spirit was amazing. Hit the surface right on time. But then, you know, this little drama queen, as she would come to be known, kept us. And I remember this so well. We were like in stomach-wrenching purgatory for 16 and a half minutes while she bounced and bounced and bounced. And I remember the looks going across the press room. You could have heard a pin drop in Von Karman, by the way. And everybody was waiting, waiting, waiting. And nobody knew. But finally, the little rover that could, beeped home.

And she not only landed upright, but she was ready to stand up and roll and rock, so to speak. There are no words to describe the joy that night. And the whole world was watching. 1.2 billion people within 72 hours of Spirit's landing hit the internet looking for these images, the first images that this rover would beam back within, I think, three hours of landing. Then opportunity. How crazy was that? After a 300 million mile flight, this little miss perfect of a rover scores a hole in one, rolling to a stop right inside a crater. I mean, what are the odds?

Nobody thought they were going to make it. And then they land like this. It was the best reality television show ever. It is a testament to not just great engineering and great science, testament to not just great engineering and great science, but you feel very strongly about how this mission was organized and that this had everything to do with the success of these two rovers. There just cannot be enough said about the rovers as machines. You know, every time I get into my car, I wonder why. Perhaps really the most significant miracle is probably that the mission happened the way it did. And a lot of that does have to do with the mission's charismatic commander-in-chief, as I call him, Steve Squires,

the PI from Cornell, who was, and I think maybe everybody knows this by now, but he was a student of Carl Sagan's, by the way. And he now teaches some of the courses that Carl taught at Cornell. MER was funded in a pretty unique way. It was sort of a holdover from the faster, better, cheaper days, in the sense that it was initially the Athena science payload of Squires was initially pitched and granted to be funded as a scout mission. This is my understanding, and I think I have all this right. But what happened is Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter both failed in 1999, and so that put the end to that mission, and NASA and the Mars program sort of took a step back and regrouped. NASA didn't want to lose the launch opportunity in 2003 because it was an excellent launch opportunity given the close proximity of Mars and Earth.

decided to fund a rover mission as a follow-on to Pathfinder Sojourner and put Steve Squire's Athena payload on top of it. And so that's sort of how it came together. Since it had initially been envisioned and since MER was then put together very quickly, it really retained the structure that a scout mission would have, which is one PI. If you remember Phoenix, Phoenix had one PI. It was Peter Smith from the University of Arizona. So Murr was first, and that was how that was structured. What Steve did with that is, by my reckoning and my dealings with people today, is also something of a miracle.

You were telling me about this just yesterday when we were getting ready for this conversation, and that you feel that that was a very happy accident, that that enabled Steve to do a lot of the wonderful things that happened with these rovers. Well, it absolutely did, and it's not, by the way, just my opinion. So what Steve did was focus on the mission objective, and that was the science. Where most missions are divided by instrument, Steve divided the team by their field of expertise, with the focus really being on the science itself. So everybody taking their instruments and working to answer the given science question,

as opposed to having different instrument teams basically competing for time, because time is valuable, especially when you're out exploring. Steve did that because that's the way scientists normally think. Now, this seems so logical and obvious, but it's really not the way most missions are structured. The other thing that Steve did was institute this structure in tried and true principles. Everything you could hope for in terms of a work environment, respect, equality, integrity, and gratitude. respect equality integrity and gratitude if you talk to any of the original mer members about going to work on mars every day they still to this day gush gratitude they're very grateful for having had this opportunity to do what they do and they're

very cognizant on a day-to-day week-toto-week basis. That, to me, is amazing because I think there's so much everybody, no matter where you work and what field you're in, there's so much that people can take away from this. So those tried-and-true principles, I think, really encourage strong working relationships, and they laid the foundation for camaraderie and cohesion. And that is huge. Sally Rail will be back with more tales of the Mars exploration rovers and the humans behind them.

This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio fans. Bill Nye here. Thanks for listening each week. Did you know the show reaches nearly 100,000 space and science enthusiasts? You and your organization can become part of Planetary Radio by becoming an underwriter. Your generosity will be acknowledged on the air each week, as well as on the Planetary Society website. To learn more, visit planetary.org slash underwriting. That's planetary.org slash underwriting. Thanks again for making us your place in space. blog and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. My guest is my friend and colleague Sally Rail.

The six-month gig she thought she had taken on has become a 10-year deep relationship with the Mars Exploration Rovers and the team that built and operated or operates them. Sally's monthly stories are the deepest ongoing coverage of the mission you'll find anywhere, and you'll find them at planetary.org. She also has an article in the next issue of the Planetary Report that goes to Planetary Society members. We're in the middle of a special extended conversation that is exclusive to the podcast version of the show. Sally was telling us about the hurdles Principal Investigator Steve Squires and others had to surmount even before they made it to the Kennedy Space Center for launch. Now, you already said something about the longevity of these rovers, that no engineer wanted to be the one whose widget was the first to fail and kill the mission. It went beyond that, and they faced some pretty tremendous challenges.

Well, they did. And again, you know, this comes back to the importance of camaraderie and cohesion. Since rovers rove, continued consensus is mandatory. And what you have and what NASA has always been is a combination of engineers and scientists, scientists who have questions and desires and places they want to go and the engineers who get them there. But basically, these are two very disparate camps. So somehow you have to find a way to bring people together, to work together to a common goal if you were going to successfully achieve continued consensus all along. So the way Steve did that was, first of all, he established sort of rules of the Martian road. The mission, for example, would be discovery-driven. Every study would

be a unified effort, as I had mentioned before. Everything was to be shared. So rather than instruments competing, you had everybody looking at the given science question or science objective and putting everything toward it. So the rover, by this rule, became the instrument. And all of the instruments on the rover became like aspects of a Swiss Army knife. The Swiss Army knife is the instrument, but the file and the pen and the scissors and the clippers, all of those are different elements of the one main instrument. And so that's how he sort of structured it, which is just a little bit different. main instrument. And so that's how he sort of structured it, which is just a little bit different. He then created, and this I think is huge, hugely important for everybody. Again,

I don't care who you are or where you work. This is really important. He created a place for everyone. And I'm talking even students working on the mission to be heard every single day, a daily science operations working group meeting known as a SWOG meeting. And then he spread the kingdom around, the kingdom I call it, right, so that he would rotate the role of chairperson. And why did he do that? I love this quote. Because, he said, the key thing to realize when you're leading a team of scientists is that you're not a general in the Army giving orders. Now, Steve's a scientist, but he nailed it on the head with that one. That kind of attitude going into that with that sort of respect and the equality.

And imagine how hard this was for some of the students. Remember Abby Freeman, who was one of our student astronauts on the Red Rover. Right, that Planetary Society program. Yeah. I mean, she was a high school student, I believe, at the time, and she was expected to speak up with not only Steve Squires, who turns heads when he walks in a room. His energy is just, if we could bottle that and sell it, we'd all be billionaires.

And then Ray Arvidsson, who is the longest-traveled Mars geologist living today, I think. That can be really intimidating. So to really make people feel that they had a place to go and if they had something to say, they were expected to speak up. Not only that it was okay to speak up, they were expected to speak up. And then on the flip side of that, he invited engineers to the science meetings, and he assigned scientists with light engineering roles, things like checking on the tau or, you know, instrument status, that kind of thing. So there was a constant back and forth between engineering and scientists

that was hugely important, too. It sounds like Steve, for all of his science and engineering credentials, also was a pretty good sociologist, pretty good with human behavior. You talked with a sociologist who looked at this mission and reached some pretty interesting conclusions.

Fascinating work, actually, and I think this is really an intriguing area. But Janet Vertesi is her name. She is a science and technology sociologist and an assistant professor at Princeton currently. But she completed her Ph.D. thesis at Cornell on the MER team. And it was basically focused on how science is done visually on another planet. She has a book coming out in 2014 called Seeing Like a Rover, which I mentioned in the Planetary Report feature. But with the organization and the structure and the work practices that Squires put into place,

and the work practices that Squires put into place, he effectively succeeded, Vertesi told me, in creating a social order with an emphatically flattened hierarchy committed to the notion of unilateral consensus. Now that's a mouthful, but basically what that means is, again, the equality comes in here. So everybody was on an equal level, even though Steve is still king, right? He's still the PI. And Steve does not have a problem of stepping in when he needs to do that.

But basically, he respected the other scientists on the team, respects the other scientists on the team, and they him. And there was this flattened hierarchy, as it's known sociologically. The other thing that I noticed, and that she brought up and certainly confirmed from a sociological point of view, is there always seemed to be something more, something different about this mission, and it was in the way the team members were bonded to these robots. And this can get into that sort of woo-woo area, but there really were moments on this mission, and they began to affect everybody, even I as a stalwart journalist, right? I found myself in 2007 when Opportunity was going through the dust storm, was literally being pummeled by this dust storm.

And you have to remember these rovers weren't built. They were built to last, but they weren't built to survive a Martian dust storm. And that was a planet-circling storm. It was really, really bad. I actually found tears welling in my eyes. And yet it was even deeper than that. It's not just that we anthropomorphize and we love the robots the way you love your pet or you love anything that's not quite as animated as a human being in your life.

It was deeper than that. And I could never really get a handle on it, actually, until I talked to Janet Ritesky. And I found never really get a handle on it, actually, until I talked to Janet Ritesy, and I found this very interesting. Because beyond just anthropomorphizing, and many of the scientists and engineers would never admit to anthropomorphizing, but it's totally human to do that. It's basically just projecting human traits onto the rovers, which is how one is enabled to look at them and love them, as one might a pet. But as Ritesi pointed out, it goes the other way, too. When I've embedded with them and she embedded with them for a good long time to do her PhD thesis, when the rovers, spirit or opportunity, were in a given situation, they actually began to develop over the years a

series of codified gestures and ways of positioning their bodies and their hands to emulate exactly how the rover was positioned and how the rover was seeing its world. Like they would put their hands up by their head to be the pan cam, or they would splay their arms out toward the back so that those were the solar arrays. And they would try to position themselves. She calls that technomorphizing. So they literally, as she put it, would transport themselves onto Mars and into the body of their rover. It's amazing because I had had people tell me this over the years. They literally come in in the morning, they look at the downloads of images that have come in from the night before,

the day before on Mars. They look out over the landscape just as the rover would be looking out. They consider the positioning of the sun. They consider what lies ahead that day. And there is sort of a communal bonding that I think goes on almost on a daily basis. By virtue of doing that, I think that they are now pioneering another aspect of human exploration on Mars. And I think that that's really important. I just want to react to what you said about the tears welling up in your eyes, as they did for many of us at different points during this mission, and still do from some of the people who are closest to these rovers. I think of people like Chris Lewicki, who was a rover driver before moving on to more authority in the mission,

who's now at Planetary Resources. moving on to more authority in the mission, who's now at Planetary Resources. Here is a guy who, if you talk to him about this mission, which occupied so much of his life as well, he becomes very emotional, and it's quite understandable. Well, that was it. That was the thing that for so long I couldn't put my finger on. It's like, why? Why are we so compelled? Is this an addiction? You know, what is going on here? Chris, I can understand well. He, very early on, was one of the younger ones on the mission who was given the feeling that if

there was an issue, he had to stand up and, you know, concerns about the airbag with spirit and whatnot. You talked about this dust storm, which nobody had really expected either of the rovers to have to survive, something so punishing. But there were many surprises, and they had to deal with the unexpected, it seems like, almost on a daily basis. You talk a little bit about dealing with the Martian winds, which both gave and took away. In addition to human-oriented miracles, putting that word in quote, there are also some physiological miracles of the rovers themselves. One of the things is, even though they were really built to last, the temperatures on Mars can swing as much as 100 degrees on a given fall or Martian

day. 100 degrees up and down, or down and further down, right, in the case of Mars being such a cold planet. Now, the rovers are made up in large part of metal parts and wires, so they expand and contract, right? They also had a number of single-point failures, meaning if that part or that wire breaks, it's mission over. So the very fact that the rovers have survived the constant thermal cycling, the up and down of temperatures, their metal parts expanding and contracting as much as they did, you know, by my reckoning, that comes a whole lot closer to being a bona fide miracle than, say, seeing Jesus on a piece of toast, right? We won't get into that kind of miracle.

Yeah, batteries. I mean, batteries are... And the batteries, they're total champs on this mission. The lithium ion batteries, they're important heroes in this mix. I mean, does the battery in your car on Earth last 10 years? I mean, and this is Mars we're talking about. So there's that. And then there are other sort of natural

miracles. The most natural miracle are the notorious Martian winds. From the very, very beginning, and I remember Jake Matejewicz and I would always talk about this, the expectation is that the dust would do the rovers in, that eventually their solar arrays, which they weren't able to tilt right they had to angle their whole body to tilt them toward the sun they figured that the dust would accumulate and eventually that would be the end of that they could not they could no longer recharge their batteries taking enough solar fuel to recharge their batteries even though they knew that the winds were there they had no real clue or no real assurance that the wind would clear those solar arrays and allow the rovers to live on.

So the natural forces of Mars, the winds that deposit the dust, also blow during the spring especially into summer and blow off some of that dust. And that has been a big reason these rovers have lasted so long. You say that Spirit and Opportunity changed everything. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I figured that question would come up. I say that because the world is different now. They sent Mars home. They made the planet, which with earthlings have forever had this love affair, into a neighbor. We now know a lot of what Mars looks like. The deserts of the Southwest, for example, they're almost familiar to us now. And Spirit and Opportunity have roved long enough that a whole entire generation of kids has grown up with rovers roving on Mars, kind of like you and I grew

up with walking on the moon. And this is exactly what you and I were promised long ago. That's right. By Robert Heinlein, by Ray Bradbury, by President Kennedy. Just like Apollo was our sort of space touchstone, MER is the touchstone for so many kids today. And that's just pretty cool. So I think they changed everything in that sense. And also, the other thing I do want to mention is that they're of their time. And I think anything that really has the kind of impact

that Spirit and Opportunity have, I mean, you might say the Beatles in rock and roll and pop music. They were really of their time, and they were also a sum that was greater than its parts. So beyond this incredible rich legacy of scientific evidence that Mars was once habitable, Spirit and Opportunity gave us the gift of exploration. I mean, this was the first mission, to my knowledge, that opened the doors to anybody. If you had a web connection and a web browser, you could hitch along for the ride. You could get the images that were coming down from Mars ostensibly before even Steve

Squires, if you were in a different time zone, and he happened to be sleeping at that time. So this was really a ticket to ride, right? I mean, that is a gift. That is a huge gift, and it was really given to the whole world. And I think that that's inspirational, and the rovers are also inspirational in ways that sort of heed the call of the human soul. I couldn't agree more. As humans, we're wired to explore. I mean, think about it.

From the moment you emerge from your mother's womb, you begin exploring. The rovers, as Jake Maticiewicz told me years ago, the rovers are another way humans project themselves into an alien environment, and I've never forgotten that. And in the end, that has different meanings to me at different times. But Jake was right. Spirit and opportunity, they're us out there on Mars. They are us. That's pretty remarkable. That is the journey of a lifetime. Remarkable and quite romantic in exactly the way that millions of people around the world have identified with. Now we have this much bigger rover out there, more sophisticated dwarfs, Spirit and Opportunity, the way they dwarfed Little Sojourner. To what degree do you think this new rover stands on the shoulders of its little sisters on the Red Planet?

Well, yes, they all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I think that that is a well-known and well-respected ism or adage in the space community. ism or adage in the space community. I think MSL, Curiosity, and MER, Spirit and Opportunity, are, as the scientists say, complementary missions. Curiosity is obviously bigger, stronger, laser-toting, but no faster. Curiosity actually goes exactly the same speed as Spirit and Opportunity, which may be why to some people it seems to be moving so slowly. But the other thing that I think people don't really think about is

these are dramatically different missions. Well, maybe not dramatically different missions in terms of scientific scope, but they're dramatically different vehicles. And the differences really lie in their official monikers, if you will. Opportunity is a Mars exploration rover, and roving is the name of its game. Curiosity is much larger, has more instruments, and it's a Mars science laboratory. And its mission is more like that of a mobile laboratory. So there's a big difference in the missions,

yet their findings are already beginning to complement each other, I think, beyond the scientist's wildest dreams in terms of Curiosity finding things very, very similar at Gale Crater as to what opportunity began returning from Cape York once she arrived at Endeavor Crater. began returning from Cape York once she arrived at Endeavour Crater. I think there's a lot of answers that will be forthcoming because the two missions do complement each other so well. It has been a long, somewhat bumpy, but extremely rewarding ride, and you've been along for every bit of it, Sally. When are you going to write a book about all this? Well, the book, yeah, it's probably done, right?

It's just an editing job. When the mission is over, I will be with the mission until it is over, and at that time I expect I'll put out the Chronicles of Spirit and Opportunity. Well, the unedited manuscript of that book that is yet to come is available at planetary.org. You can see these reports that Sally has been providing essentially on a monthly basis over the entire lifetime of these two amazing rovers who are very much our emissaries on the red planet. And one of them continues to explore that fascinating, fascinating world. Sally, you have helped to make it all the more fascinating. Thank you for that, and thank you for this conversation as well. Well, you're welcome, and I'm glad that you

point out that opportunity is still going, and it's not just still barely moving. The rover is going and has many more scientifically textbook-informing, textbook-changing findings that are likely to come this winter. So this rover isn't slowing down anytime soon. Go Oppy and show Curiosity how to do it. Thanks again, Sally. There you go. You bet. Thank you so much, Matt. It's time for the just barely pre-Christmas edition of What's Up? With the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts, who can currently be seen in our thank you video, thanking all the people who we work with and supported us in the past year. You almost wrap things up.

You have the penultimate appearance in that video, which is on our YouTube channel and in the multimedia section of the website. It was a fun video to put together. You were especially fun to watch. Although, believe it or not, you crashed my editing system over and over and over. No one else did that. Yeah, well, I incorporated some things that would make sure to crash your system. So go watch the thank you video and make sure you just hang around until the very end. Yeah, yeah, do stay until the end.

It ain't over until it's over, folks. Venus dropping fast, fast, fast fast low prices on venus it is in the low in the west after sunset as it has been for months and months and it still will be but only for another another week or two till it gets really challenging january 2nd shortly after sunset low low in the west you can pick up up Venus near the crescent moon. But we have lots of other friends coming up to play. We got Jupiter in the opposite horizon in the east early in the evening, rising just shortly after sunset and looking quite bright. Mars coming up in the middle of the night in the east, and Saturn is over in the east in the pre-dawn sky.

We move on to this week in space history. It was 45 years ago that humans first orbited the moon, in this case in Apollo 8. Oh, and not only that, but our listener Steve Coulter wanted to make sure that we remember to mention that that gave humans the first opportunity to take photos of the Earth rising over the limb of the moon. Quite a historic, quite a powerful image.

We need to do it again someday. They're doing it right now, just not with humans. Yeah, I mean with a finger on a shutter. I mean, you know what I mean. And you want them to use film. I know. Just for old time's sake. On to random space fact.

That was festive. It's such a festive time of year. Speaking of festive, the European Space, just launched their Gaia spacecraft. It's a happy billions and billions kind of spacecraft. It's a billion-dollar spacecraft with a billion-pixel focal plane designed to carefully measure the positions of a billion stars. That really is billions and billions. Okay, we move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, what mass of regoliths, so rocks and dust and the like, did Apollo 17 return to Earth? It was the most of any single mission to the moon. How'd we do, Matt?

Hernani Yap. Excellent. Yeah, isn't that fun? We are so pleased. And not only that, but Hernani used to read a lot of Carl Sagan's books, not billions and billions of them, but loved it. And he used to mention the Planetary Society in those books, and he's glad he's found our website. And we're glad, too, Hernani, who said that it was 110.52 kilograms of lunar regolith that was returned by Apollo 17. Does he have that right, wise one? That is correct.

Ah, excellent. Well, we are going to send him. He gets the first of those year-in-space wall calendars that are really terrific. And I think we'll give it away another one this week. I got some more. Wojtek Nowolek, on the other side of the world, from the Czech Republic. He said, yeah, about 111 kilograms. So it was like carrying a dead body in the trunk.

Wow. This was very clever. Ilya Schwartz. 0.2 grams of the Luna 16 soil that was returned by that Soviet sample return mission were sold at Sotheby's auction for $442,500 20 years ago, 1993. This means that the total of all the stuff returned by Apollo, 382 kilograms, in 1993 dollars, was worth $845,175,000,000. Somehow I think if you increase the supply to market, the price would drop. But still precious and precious scientifically to this day. Yes, absolutely. I'll just mention the Maeve Hamrick was only worried that maybe some Selenian hyperslugs might have snuck along for the ride with all of that regolith.

They check carefully for those. Oh, I got to read you this one. I thought I was done, but this one is special. Mark Wilson said it wasn't publicized at the time, but the Apollo 17 astronauts also brought back a model rocket discovered on the moon's surface. It was launched in 1972 by a young man who dreamt of one day flying there himself. That young man's name was Bruce Betts.

I haven't read that book. I wondered what happened to that rocket. I did lose a rocket right about then. You must have really pumped and pumped that thing. Hey, it was a three-stager. I wish I'd had one of those.

All right, now we can move on. All right, next trivia contest, and what are we giving away, Matt? Still the fabulous Year in Space calendar complete with facts, pictures, trivia, and the like? Yes, absolutely. The wall calendar. Folks, you've got to see it to believe it.

Do you know the website? You can get more information and order your own at yearinspace.com. All right, here's your question. Around what location in space will the Gaia spacecraft orbit? Where in space will Gaia orbit? Go to planetary.org slash radiocontest and get us your entry. By when, Matt? By New Year's Eve Eve. That would be the 30th of December at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Monday the 30th, 2 p.m. Pacific time.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about doggy dreams. Thank you, and good night. Isn't it wonderful just to watch them? Don't you just want to be in there and wonder what they're chasing? Exactly. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects

for the Planetary Society, who does join us every week here for What's Up? Happy Holidays, Guy. Happy Holidays. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by the roving members of the Society. Clear skies and happy holidays, everyone.