Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Mars Exploration Rover Update with Project Scientist Bruce Banerdt

Episode Date: May 4, 2009

Bruce Banerdt provides a status report on Spirit and Opportunity. Bill Nye has something old and something new to talk about, and Bruce Betts returns from the Planetary Defense Conference in Spain with news of Near Earth Objects and other things in the night sky.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A Mars Rover Update, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Time to check in with Spirit and Opportunity. Nearly five and a half years and they are still trekking across the red planet. We'll get a report on the twin rovers from project scientist Bruce Banner of JPL. Bill Nye has something old and something new to talk about today. And Bruce Betts is back from Spain with

lots to tell us about the night sky. Emily Lakdawalla has the week Thank you. The Society's Director of Projects has completed his reporting from Granada, Spain, where he attended and presented at the Planetary Defense Conference. Bruce will tell us more about his trip during What's Up. You can also turn to the blog for the latest on the Dawn mission to the solar system's two largest asteroids. Mark Raymond is project system engineer for Dawn. He takes us deep inside mission operations with the fascinating and somewhat harrowing tale of a major software upgrade. Are you a bit intimidated when you upgrade your computer's operating system? Try doing it when your machine is more than 300 million kilometers from home. million kilometers from home. All went well, and Dawn is preparing for the transition from coasting back to ion-engine-powered flight in June. It's a go-for-lift-off of space shuttle Atlantis on May

11, setting out for the fifth and final Hubble Space Telescope repair mission. Here's Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. And this week I want to talk about the old and the new. People are still very concerned that the space shuttle is going to be retired. And then the United States will not have any direct way to get to the International Space Station. You're going to have to rely on Russian rockets. What's the big deal? We've relied, or the United States has rely on Russian rockets. What's the big deal? We've relied, or the United States has relied on Russian rockets for years.

Get over it. Let's move on. And these aerospace workers who work on the shuttle will have their efforts best put to new projects, new adventures, new rockets, new, more efficient, less experimental spacecraft. And by the way, the Ares is going to have cost overruns, so they're trying to hurry it up. No, just do it right. Just get it done carefully. Meanwhile, astronomers have observed what they believe to be the oldest event ever observed, this blob of gas that happened 800 million years after the universe

was formed, over 13 billion years ago. And we discovered an exoplanet, a planet orbiting another star that's only, if you will, about twice the size of the Earth, not Saturn, not Jupiter, an Earth-like planet, Gliese 581e. I mean, my friends, you can worry about the past and the technology of getting up and down to space and our national concerns about who might be getting the ultimate high ground in space, but let's not forget the discoveries being made in astronomy are astonishing. All of this will, in some way, change the world. I just encourage everybody to relax about the space shuttle program. It's time to move forward, onward, and upward.

Well, thanks for listening. I've got to fly. Bill N opportunity the Mars Exploration Rovers are up to? You have at least two choices. You can check out the detailed update just posted to planetary.org by my colleague A.J.S. Rail, or you can stick around for my conversation with project scientist Bruce Bannard. Heck, why not do both? Bruce is a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California, birthplace of the Twin Explorers.

We're coming up on the sixth anniversaries of their launches. Maybe you were with us for the live webcast as Spirit bounced down in Gusev Crater on January 3, 2004. Opportunity landed in the Meridiani Planum exactly three weeks later. No one who helped build these little robotic emissaries thought that they would still be doing their jobs half a decade later. Hey Bruce, thanks for joining us on Planetary Radio. I'm pleased to be here. You know, Captain Kirk returns to the big screen this week. His first mission was only five years.

Well, we probably will get pretty well past him then with this mission. We've already gone about over five years, about five years and four months now. So we're definitely giving him a run for his money. What is it that Steve Squires likes to say? You're in the, I don't know, what is it, fifth year or sixth year of the 90-day mission? Yeah, we're into the sixth year of our 90-day mission, or our 1886 Sol of our 90 Sol mission, to be a little bit more technical. Well, we want to get to science, but let's start with the health of these rovers, and in particular, Spirit. Spirit has been having a little problem with amnesia. How is that going?

Well, it's been going really well, actually. We've had about two full weeks now of operations with no further complications. Even while it was having these problems, it had about five days in which it had sort of a series of events. It had some amnesia events. It had a few events where it restarted its flight computer. It just sort of said, you know, everything's bad, reboot. And it rebooted and came back up, which kind of clears everything out and starts over again, sort of like your desktop computer. We don't know why it had these events where it wakes up and

doesn't remember anything from the day before. But all during this period where these things were happening, during that time, it kept itself power positive. It kept its thermal state nice and steady. It was in communication, was willing to talk to us at the appointed times. And so even though this was extremely concerning, on one level, we felt fairly comfortable with the vehicle because it was sort of doing what it needed to do and recovering from these kind of strange events pretty naturally and thoroughly. And so we've got a team of experts that are looking at all the data that's come down and all the clues that we have. They haven't come up with any solutions yet, but they've got a bunch of leads that they're trying to run down

and figure out just what went on here. Meanwhile, we've gone back to normal operations, and we're resuming our trek around home plate. And doing that backwards and, I guess, making pretty good time. We're doing pretty good. We have a hard time making progress with Spirit because we have the front wheel that's frozen up. So we're running backwards and kind of dragging that wheel behind us, which means that any time we try to go uphill,

when we've got loose dirt under our wheels, we tend to start digging in. And so we have to be pretty careful where we drive around home play because there's a lot of loose dirt lying around on the ground, blown up against slopes and things like that. So we're being pretty careful, and, you know, we're getting a little bit bogged down here and there. And when we do, we back up and try another direction. And so we had some pretty long drives a couple of weeks ago.

We were getting 10, 15, 20 meters for a drive, which for Spirit is a pretty good time. But right now we're actually having a little bit of a slow time getting around kind of a really gentle little ridge that has some dirt blown up against it. We're trying to get around that and kind of get around to the south of home plate so we can head towards our next science targets, which are about 100 or 80 meters to the south of us right now. Hasn't that stuck wheel and the digging that it's done been at least a bit of a blessing in disguise? Oh, absolutely. In fact, it's done been at least a bit of a blessing in disguise? Oh, absolutely.

In fact, it's made a very nice trenching tool. I mean, you know, a lot of geologists, you know, carry a little shovel around with them to dig a trench and kind of see what's under the very surface of the dirt. So Spirit does that as a matter of course now, whether we like it or not. And it's turned up some really interesting stuff for us. It's opened up sort of a window into the subsurface of the soil. The thing that's really jumped out at us is some very, it looks like snow almost, really white soil in the images.

And we've done some analysis on these in several places now. In fact, we found it over about more than halfway around home plate, sort of from the sort of eastern side all the way around the north. And now we're seeing it again down the western side of home plate. And this white soil turns out to be chemically a very distinctive fingerprint of hydrothermal or volcanic vent activity. We found some soils that are very high in salts, sulfate salts that are typically concentrated by this kind of activity, and some soil which is really, really high concentrations of amorphous silica,

which is the mineral opal. And it's in powdered form. Again, this is something that we find in hydrothermal systems like Yellowstone pools and things like that on the Earth. Also in some of the volcanic steam vents around the active volcanoes like in Hawaii. Wow. So this is something that's really fascinating. And the thing that's kind of enticing about it is that this is actually in the soil. And it's not more than a handful of millimeters below the surface, you know, just a fraction of an inch below the surface.

And we know that this dirt gets blown around on Mars. You know, we can see the ripples moving. And so this is in a mobile material. Conceivably, this is relatively recent. I mean, it could be geologically recent activity that caused that. We can't say for certain, but the fact that it's not in a solid rock, which could easily, you know, stay the way it is billions of years on Mars, the fact that it's in soil and we have the soil moving around from the wind indicates that perhaps this is something a little bit more recent than a lot of the other processes we've been studying. It just struck me that we can now talk almost nonchalantly about hydrothermal activity on this once-dead planet. Isn't that amazing? I mean, it's hard to think back, you know, five years ago before these rovers landed, and we had, you know, lots of evidence from orbit that there was some kind of water activity on Mars.

Billions of years ago, we could see channels that had been carved and some sort of poorly formed valley networks. And so we knew that there was some water that happened sometime, but maybe for a very short period. And we didn't really know whether it was pervasive or not. And now, you know, from the evidence on these two rovers on opposite sides of the planet of really pervasive and really generally active activity of water that's changed these rocks around in lots of different ways, the idea that water was plentiful on the Martian surface and subsurface back early in its history is so well accepted, it's hard to remember that once we weren't sure about it. We'll hear more from Mars Exploration Rover Project Scientist Bruce Bannard

when Planetary Radio continues in a minute. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed

Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're in the middle of an update from JPL's Bruce Bannard, project scientist for the stunningly successful

Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, nearly five and a half years into their sojourn on the Red Planet. Bruce has been telling us about Spirit's progress, including its discovery of this interesting white material just a few millimeters below the surface. So white stuff, not far under the surface, although I guess Phoenix will still have a monopoly on finding water, digging up water ice. That's right. All our evidence is still chemical evidence. We haven't really gotten our feet wet. Let's jump around to the other side of that planet and check in with Opportunity, which is still covering a lot of ground. Is it still

also going backwards? It switches around. Sometimes it goes frontwards and sometimes it goes backwards. Actually, it's got all six wheels that are working, although it's sort of had this nagging problem where the current in one of the front wheel motors tends to get a little bit high. That could be an indication of wear in that motor. And what we've found is that if we turn the rove around and run it backwards for a while and let it rest, those currents go back down to normal. And we think that perhaps, you know, there's some lubricant that's getting redistributed in the gearbox. These things have an amazing gear ratio of hundreds to one on these motors so that they've

got lots of little gears in there. And, of course, as these wheels spin around and around and around, you know, we're producing some kind of wear in these gears, and there's lubricant that was only, you know, designed to last for 90 days, and we don't get to go in and have a grease job every 20,000 miles like we do on the earth here. So far we've been able to, like I said, in every case that it's happened, mitigate it by resting it and by running it backwards for a while where we think it redistributes this lubricant.

Other than that, it's been really healthy. We're keeping an eye on that, and we've been going frontwards, going backwards. It doesn't really care which way it goes too much, actually. How is its progress toward that still pretty distant destination called Endeavour? It's making really good progress. In fact, we made almost half a kilometer in one week of driving, which is pretty darn good for these rovers. I mean, there's a lot of sort of what we call ripples. They're sort of small sand dune-like features that you can get stuck in if you're not careful. It's happened. But right now, we're kind of

going with the grain of these things. So we were able to sort of run down the trough between these ripples pretty well. So we're making pretty good progress. We can make up to 100, 120 meters in a day when we're driving. Wow. And every once in a while we get a little bit stuck, but we've got some pretty effective autonomous checks for that on board now so we don't dig ourselves in deep like we did a few years ago at Purgatory. So we've got several kilometers we've made now since we left Victoria Crater. We still have about, oh, about 13 or 14 kilometers to go to get down to that Endeavor crater. But we can see it on the horizon now. We can actually see the rim of Endeavor sort of just coming up above the horizon 12, 13 kilometers to the south of us.

I've got a great picture from our site, planetary.org, right in front of me from the last major report that was done by my colleague, AJS Rail, and I bet we're due for another one of those fairly soon. But, of course, we'll put up the link to your site at JPL as well. Quickly, with just a couple of minutes left, is it all about transportation now for opportunity getting there, or is science being done along the way? Moving along is our highest priority right now, but we're able to do quite a bit of science. We can look off to the side, and we've been actually going a little bit out of our way every once in a while to run by some small craters that we can identify from the orbital imaging,

which is really fantastic resolution orbital imaging we're getting right now from the high-rise instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And so we can plan our route to go by, you know, scenic views every once in a while and pick those guys up. We're also keeping our eyes open for what we call exotic cobbles. And these are rocks which are hand-sized or larger that we can get our analysis instruments on. or larger that we can get our analysis instruments on. The Meridiani planes that are opportunities going across are really uniform sulfate sandstone. And it hasn't changed much in all the time we've been driving across it.

And we've put on like 15 kilometers now on this machine. But there are some rocks laying around every once in a while that are meteorites or that have been blasted from somewhere else on the planet. And so these are something with a different mineralogy, a different composition. And so we're watching for those. And when we find something like that, we can stop and do an analysis. So we're doing some science as we go along. And certainly, you know, if we find anything that's out of the ordinary,

we're going to stop and look at it. But our eyes are pretty well set on that Endeavor crater, and we're trying to make the best rate we can towards that. Eyes on the prize. What's the spirit there at JPL? You guys have been at this for so many years. The science continues to roll in, and really, I think it'd be difficult to point to any other mission that has generated as much cumulative excitement as these two little rovers. It's a little bit hard to believe me, but it's still just like Christmas morning every day.

We're planning a drive on one or the other of these rovers every day, sometimes two a day. The science team is distributed across the country, but we have these teleconferences every morning, and we can't wait to see the stuff that's come down from the day before, and we can't wait to do the drives and the measurements for the next day. And it's still exciting after all these years. I mean, we haven't gotten the seven-year itch yet. Well, please give our best wishes to the rest of the team, and we'll look forward to checking in again sometime soon.

Thank you for continuing to share all these wonders from the red planet with those of us down here on the little blue one. Well, really, it's my pleasure. It's a thrill to still be here after all these years and be able to share this with people. And I'm really thrilled about the stuff you guys are doing over there at the Planetary Society. Thank you. We'll try and keep it up. And you guys, please do the same. Bruce Bannert is the project scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover Project. He is a planetary scientist, geologist at JPL, and among other things, among other awards he's picked up back in 2002, those included the JPL Award for Excellence. And we'll do a little exploring of the night sky when we move on to What's Up with Bruce Betts, just moments away here on Planetary Radio.

From one Bruce right on to another, it's time to talk with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. to another. It's time to talk with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He's here with What's Up and is here just back from Spain, where I guess you had an interesting experience on the flight back. Hola! Why, yes. You know everything, don't you? My spies are out there. Out of Madrid, the mysterious mechanical failure. So we're going back to Madrid. And meanwhile, they were dumping, dumping, dumping fuel out of the wings.

It was really quite impressive. Wow, must have been pretty. It was, actually. I took pictures. I took video. It was wonderful. And we lived through it, so that was all the much better. Tell us about other pretty stuff up in the night sky.

All right. We've got in the night sky. All right. We've got in the evening sky, you might still be able to check out Mercury, but it's getting low and getting dimmer over there in the west just after sunset. It's right near the Pleiades star cluster. We've also got Saturn, though, still up very high in the south after sunset and in the early evening, looking kind of yellowish, still in Leo, below Leo, at least the way I think about Leo. And in the pre-dawn, it is nasty with planets. And thanks to my severe confusion of what time zone I was in, I was up before dawn and had a lovely view of Venus and Jupiter over Granada. Oh, right. It was to catch that flight. Jupiter is the really bright object to the upper right and Venus, the really bright object to its lower left.

It's tougher. You might see Mars below Venus, almost directly below Venus by just a little bit, but both Jupiter and Venus, quite striking. Also, peak of the Eta Aquarids meteor shower happening on the morning of May 6th. Extra meteors a few days before and a few days after. This is optimum for our southern hemisphere listeners, of which I know we have many, where they get a better shot at the radiant of the meteor shower

and might get up to 60 or 80 meteors per year. It's perhaps the best of the year for them. Did you notice that you said 60 or 80 per year uh no i didn't notice i said that and you know you would but that's if you only went out for one night per one hour per year yeah which is how i do it anyway 60 to 80 per hour thank you for Welcome to Random Space Facts. A little jet lag there at the end? Yeah, yeah, kind of couldn't hold it. I have, of course, been hearing tons of random space facts at the Planetary Defense Conference, and they've been leaking into the Planetary Society blog where you can read more about the conference. They've also been on my random space fact Twitter account. But let me

give you one, the basic kind of overview one, which is that there have been about 6,000 near-Earth objects now discovered, still discovering lots more. Of those 6,000, they've discovered about 800 that are bigger than a kilometer. This is, you know, ruin a whole lot of people's day if they hit. They've now reached the goal of discovering over 90% of those, but still some more to be found. And about 20% of this whole 6,000 population are considered potentially hazardous objects, meaning they really get close enough to Earth that we should pay more attention to them. I was going to wait until the very end of the conversation and ask you more about the conference, and I will still do that, but thank you.

That's a sobering fact there. Sobering. Should we go on to the trivia contest? Sure. I asked you last time around about the moon, and as seen from the surface of the earth, how big is the full moon in angular size to the nearest 10th of a degree of arc? How'd we do, Matt? You know, I can't explain it, but we only got about half the entries that we normally get. But most of them were correct. A few people didn't quite understand that you wanted this answer in degrees. You said

to the nearest 10 tenth of a degree. And that's good news, I suppose, for Craig Hutchinson because it helped the odds on Random.org. Craig Hutchinson of Suffolk, Virginia. It's only been just over three months since Craig last won. So definitely good news for him. He said to the nearest tenth of a degree of arc, the moon subtends 0.5 degrees as seen from Earth. That is correct. We had other people who pointed out, as did Ed Lupin, that it varies between 0.49 and 0.57

or, as a lot of people put it, Olivier Lassaux among them, 29.3 to 34.1 arc minutes. Sure, you could go to 34.1 arc minutes. Sure, you could go that way. Is it like breathing or what? What? It's not like breathing. No, I actually, I know what the answer is.

I mean, why is the moon getting smaller and larger on a regular basis? Oh, that's what you meant. I thought you were asking if the moon was breathing. I thought you were concerned about my health. Yes, I'm still breathing. It was just a bad joke. Oh, okay. No, it's the elliptical nature of the

moon's orbit, meaning it's not in a perfect circle. That joke was of a rather elliptical nature, actually. But I'm... Yeah, so I have to agree. This is actually something... This is a good little random space fact to stick in your head kind of regularly, because if you look

up stuff in the night sky, like how far away are Jupiter and Venus, and it'll be given in degrees of arc, or arc minutes for those like bigger numbers. Well, Craig, we're going to send you another Planetary Radio t-shirt. Actually, he probably got a calendar three months ago, so it's time that he got a t-shirt and a chance for a Oceanside Photo and Telescope rewards card. I also wanted to point out that the sun also subtends about half a degree of arc, so the same as the moon, and that's why we get total eclipses, because they have the same rough angular size. So it also gives you an idea in the daytime sky of what half a degree of arc looks like. Let us go on to the next trivia contest, and I just

can't get enough near-Earth objects and planetary defense and threat of asteroids, so let's give you a practical example. A similar but distinctly different from last week's question, I ask you, what is the only natural object, so not artificial man-made satellite, but only natural object that was observed in space and tracked before it hit the Earth. Go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter. And you've gone until May 11. That'd be Monday, May 11 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. Before we finish, any other highlights from that little trip that you just got back from to España? I mean, Hispaniola, I took French in high school. Yeah, go with España.

It was good, and it was interesting. Like 150, 200 of the world's experts on near-Earth objects learned a lot, 150, 200 of the world's experts on near-Earth objects and learned a lot talking about detecting and tracking and what we do to actually try to stop these. But the one thing that came out of it all was there's a lot more work to be done. We also announced our new Shoemaker-Neo grant winners, as you know from last week's show. As I mentioned, I did put some entries into the Planetary Society's blog, so you can check them out there for a little bit more in the way of an update from the conference.

Okay, excellent. And I don't know how you're making those weird things happen with your voice, but you're very talented, as we know from Random Space Fact. It's a trick I learned in Spain. I think Skype is letting us down this week. So we'll just say good night. Go out there looking up in the night sky and think about the pleasant feel of your own bed. Thank you and hasta luego and buenas noches.

And buenas noches to you. He is the doctor, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. The Kepler spacecraft is preparing to search for Earth-like planets circling other stars. Join us next time for a conversation with its science principal investigator, William Barucki. Planetary Radio is produced by

the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.