Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Martian Anniversary for Spirit and Opportunity!

Episode Date: November 28, 2005

One Martian year of Spirit and Opportunity on Mars with Jim Bell, Cornell University; Q and A on a crusty moon; special trivia contest prize.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's a Martian one-year anniversary, 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. A year on Mars for spirit and opportunity. And not just a measly Earth-type year. A Martian year is nearly twice as long as one of ours. We'll celebrate and reflect with Jim Bell of the Mars Exploration Rover team. Later today, Bruce Betts will call with a new edition of our What's Up segment, and we've got a special prize for the winner of his space trivia contest. A celebration is also at the top of our space news this week.

On its second attempt, the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft successfully grabbed a few grams of asteroid Itokawa. The exact amount of space rock acquired won't be known until the little probe returns to Earth in June of 2007. Read all about it at planetary.org. The deputy head of China's space program says putting Chinese astronauts on the moon by 2020 is a pretty good goal, budget permitting. And why not throw in a new space station while you're at it? The world's largest nation denies any sense of competition with the United States. Hmm, what would you call something like that?

A space race? Catchy. And while Bruce will have an update on the solar system's only current space station during What's Up, I had to share this item with you. It seems ISS commander Bill MacArthur just couldn't wait to see the latest Harry Potter movie. NASA found a way to get it to him, and it didn't involve portkeys, flu powder, or brooms. I wonder how popcorn tastes in space. I'll be back with rover team member Jim Bell right after a particularly crusty Q&A from Emily.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, are there planets that have icy crusts? One must be cautious these days about what one calls a planet, but there are certainly plenty of worlds in the solar system whose surface materials are composed of ice. In the inner solar system, it's too hot for ice to persist on planetary surfaces, except at the poles. Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, and Mars

all have solid surfaces that are primarily composed of rock. But the story is quite different in the much colder outer solar system. Solid surfaces on the worlds orbiting the giant planets are, almost without exception, composed of water and other ices. We even know that Pluto and the other worlds in the Kuiper Belt have surfaces composed of ices of water, nitrogen, and methane.

How do we know what the surfaces of these worlds are made of when they are too small for telescopes to resolve them? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. We haven't talked to Jim Bell in quite a while. The Associate Professor of Astronomy at Cornell is also a key member of the science team for the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Among other things, he was the lead developer of the Pan Cams, those super high-resolution main cameras that take amazing snapshots of the Martian surface. We caught him last week in his office just before he headed home to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday.

Jim Bell, happy Thanksgiving. I guess all of you who are on the MER team, the Mars Exploration Rover team, have a lot to be thankful for. Absolutely, Matt. Thank you very much. It's been just an amazing Mars year of exploration with both spirit and opportunity. And so we absolutely have an enormous amount to be thankful for. I went on the website last night just catching up a little bit in preparation for this conversation, and I kept coming across one thing after another, and each one was a jaw-dropper.

Eight times the original goal for distance covered on Mars. Seven times the warranty. And looking at spirit alone, something like 70,000 images returned to Earth. Yeah, it's hard to believe it's true. I keep waiting for someone to pinch me, and it's going to be January 3, 2004. No, it's been in just about any way you can measure a space exploration mission. These rovers have been phenomenally successful. space exploration mission. These rovers have been phenomenally successful. NASA managers come up with ways to measure success related to how far you drive or how many pictures you take or

how many spectra you acquire, things like that. And those are interesting ways to measure success. But I think for the scientists on the team, the important part is are you doing good science? Have you made scientific discoveries? Have you found out new things about Mars that we didn't know before? Are you enabling future discoveries with the things that you're finding? And certainly both Spirit and Gusev Crater and Opportunity and Meridiani Planum have done all of those things scientifically. Yeah, no shortage of qualitative results from these rovers. And in addition to that, they are an inspiration in everything that they've accomplished

and in what they've told us about Mars. I mean, what gives you the most satisfaction about what these rovers have learned? Well, Matt, I think probably number one on my list is, you know, I look back at my training in graduate school and the research I did before I got involved with MER, and there was this hypothesis based on data from Viking, from Mars Global Surveyor, from telescopic measurements, this hypothesis that Mars had liquid water on its surface in the past.

And lots of debate among planetary geologists about the origin of some of the features that were seen carved in the rock. Are they water carved or some other liquid? Lots of debate among geochemists on the origin of some of the minerals that were seen in the spectroscopic data. Were they water-related? Could they form through volcanic processes? So this hypothesis was out there that Mars had liquid water. And what we were able to do with especially Opportunity, but also more recently with Spirit, is, I believe, to prove conclusively that there was liquid water at or very close to the surface of Mars for significant periods of time, at least in the places that we've been able to explore with these rovers.

To me, as a scientist, that's a big deal when you set out to test a hypothesis and you test it positively. And that means, you know, we could go from there and say, OK, now let's look at some of the other issues that that's going to open up. That result on its own seems to set the stage for a pretty exciting future of Mars exploration. I think you're right. Part of that is going to come from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched this past summer. We'll get to Mars in March and hopefully enter Mars orbit successfully

and have a many-year mission of geologic mapping with a very high-resolution camera, with a high-resolution spectrometer, and a very exciting radar sounder as well to look into the subsurface. You have a role on that mission, don't you? A group of us here at Cornell are involved in some of the cameras on MRO, the wide-angle color camera called MARSI, which will be essentially providing a weather satellite view of Mars every day in color. And we also are involved with another camera called CTX, the context camera, which will

provide six-meter-per-pixel monochrome black-and-white images of large parts of the planet. Wow. Back to those rovers. I think they mean a lot to us from the engineering standpoint because you guys have demonstrated that we can build these machines that can crawl around in this extremely hostile environment and just keep going and going and going. Absolutely.

And I think it's funny the way we think of it as a hostile environment and just keep going and going and going. Absolutely. And I think it's funny the way we think of it as a hostile environment. And certainly to humans, it's a hostile environment. But you have to remember these machines, these robots, were built for that environment. I like to think of them as actually in their native habitat. And when we were working with them in the laboratory at JPL or down at Cape Canaveral in Florida, they were like fish out of water. We'd get kind of crummy images from the camera because it was so warm, and the cameras are really designed to operate cold.

And, you know, they'd be in this pristine, clean environment, and it's clear that they really enjoy being dirty and dusty. Now that they're there, I think they're operating where they were designed to be, and that's partly why they're doing so well. So you merely sent a couple of refugees home. Exactly. It's one way to look at it. That's right. Certainly they have had their problems. Last night, once again, looking at the website,

Certainly they have had their problems. Last night, once again, looking at the website, I was watching the movies assembled from that period that ended in June of 2005 where Opportunity managed to get itself out of the sand trap. That had to be scary. I mean, I was watching it first as those wheels spun. And you could see, if you watch carefully, days are going by because you can watch the shadows go by and then it starts over. At first, it just looked like it was digging itself deeper. And it was like going to a movie that you've seen ten times, you

know the ending, but it was still scary as all hell. It was a little bit worrisome. I wouldn't say it was scary, but it was worrisome whether we would extract ourselves from that predicament. In fact, after being stuck in that small dune for a few weeks and the progress was very slow coming out, some of the people on the team started naming it Purgatory. We thought we might be there for a long time. But I'll tell you, there was a lot of work done by the JPL rover drivers, the folks who run the spare test rover at JPL, and a lot of people on the science team, my colleague Rob Sullivan here at Cornell, who studies these kinds of windblown deposits, trying to figure out the best way to get out. And again and again, they were telling everyone on the team, slow and steady, slow and steady.

That's the way to get out. So even though the wheels were slipping a lot, we were making a few centimeters progress a day. And they'd just say, just be patient. We're going to get out. Just be patient. Eventually, the wheels will grab. They'll get traction. And that's exactly what they did. Of course, it took 40 days and 40 nights, but it worked.

I'll be back with Jim Bell as we mark a full Martian year for the Mars Exploration Rovers. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail.

We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit, and we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org. You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report. It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more?

Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. Astronomer and planetary scientist Jim Bell of Cornell University is our guest, and he's helping us mark a pretty amazing anniversary. After a full Martian year of rolling around opposite sides of Mars, you'd think Spirit and Opportunity would have gotten pretty grungy by now.

I wonder if anybody had any idea before you realized it was happening that the rovers would periodically be dry-cleaned by the Martian climate, by the environment? You know, I think a lot of us thought that it was possible. We really know very little about how Mars dust sticks to equipment and how eventually it will stick to people when people go there. You know, it's very fine-grained. It's like micron-sized smoke particles almost that are settling out of the atmosphere. And I tell the students here to try to imagine what it's like to deal with this stuff.

Next time you're baking a pie in your kitchen, take the bag of flour and just throw it around the kitchen. Just throw flour everywhere. And then try to clean it up. And I make sure that they agree to clean it up before doing this. And you'll never be able to clean up all the flour. Years later, you'll come back and you'll find flour in little crevices that you didn't even know were in your kitchen. It's the same with Mars dust. It gets into everything. Because it's so fine, it sort of electrostatically adheres to surfaces.

And so we figured once the solar panels started getting coated or covered by dust, it would just sort of be electrostatically stuck to it, and that layer would just build up with time. And that's what was seen on Pathfinder, on the Pathfinder rover, for example. Apparently what's happening is there is some small layer of dust that's always adhering to the panels. I mean, they're not pristine and clean and blue like they were before we launched. What must happen is that these multiple layers that stack up upon each other don't stick to each other very well, and so the wind can come along, even a modest gust of wind can sort of blow these, what might be fairy castle structures just off the deck.

I mean, we don't know in detail. The particles are too small to see even with our microscope. So we still don't know a lot about what physically is happening with the dust interacting with the panels. That said, we're really thankful for these gusts of wind because they've extended our life much longer than we ever imagined. I've seen a little light dusting also of what I read was your favorite part of your sort of first-person involvement with this mission, and that was mounting the Mars sundials. Well, this was one of my favorite parts of the engineering side of it

because it's sort of as close to the spacecraft as I was allowed to get. You know, the engineers get very nervous when the scientists get around the spacecraft because they're afraid we're going to trip over an extension cord or, you know, do something really bad. And, you know, I spent a lot of time around the cameras. I was the leader of the team of people who helped to do all the testing and some of the assembly on the Pan Cam system. So, you know, we would handle those and deal with those just fine. But once you get to the level of all of it's assembled and there's this rover in front of you and you know how many thousands of hours of people's time are in it

and how many millions of dollars worth of taxpayer money is sitting right in front of you in this amazing spacecraft, it's a nervous experience getting close to one. It's almost like a paparazzi or secret service of people who are associated with the rovers who are just watching others around them. You know, this is true for all spacecraft. There's people whose job it is to make sure that, you know, a technician doesn't lean too far over when they're trying to screw in a bolt

or that there aren't cables sitting around that people could trip over. And so you know this sense of as you're getting close to the rover, you're being watched. Every action you take is being monitored very carefully. I will confess I was sweating a little bit. Yeah, I think I'd be frightened to get within about 10 feet, but I'm glad you were able to do it because those Mars sundials have certainly been a big part of the public success of these rovers. With just a couple of minutes left, if you could tell us a little bit about what's happening now on both sides of Mars. if you could tell us a little bit about what's happening now on both sides of Mars.

I hope it's not too big of a surprise, but I just read that Spirit has been coordinating some work with the Hubble Space Telescope. Well, it's not a surprise at all because I'm involved with the team on the Hubble Space Telescope side, too. Excellent. Yeah, we actually planned some observations with Spirit looking up at the atmosphere and down at the surface at the same exact time that the Space Telescope was looking down at Mars. And so it's sort of a cross-calibration experiment, but also there's a bunch of science that we're hoping to do by being able to essentially observe the same photons at the same time

with two different sets of instruments, one looking up and one looking down. The measurements from the telescope were great, and so we're busily trying to figure out what kind of science is contained in there. But Spirit actually spent most of September up on the summit of Husband Hill. It was a broad plateau and lots of outcrop up there and lots of different rock types we've been characterizing. Since that time, we've been driving down the southern side of the hills. So now we're driving down the other side of the hill that we came up,

and we're heading towards this large basin, into this large basin on the south side of the hill, where there are some very interesting deposits that, from orbit, almost look sedimentary. They almost look like possibly evaporate rock deposits. You can't really tell from orbit. So since we're only about a kilometer or so away from them with Spirit, we're just going to drive over there and check them out. Real quick, how about the other side of the planet, Meridiani? At Meridiani, Opportunity is driving around a crater called Erebus,

and we're heading on our way towards Victoria, which is a much larger crater. Erebus is turning out to be surprising as well because it looks like a pretty big crater from orbit, but when we get on the ground, most of it is filled with sand. So we have to be very careful not to get bogged down in the sand again and sort of gingerly driving around the outcrop, measuring its chemistry and composition. Any end in sight for these rovers? You know, Matt, there's no obvious end. Nothing is degrading.

Nothing is running out. The spirits of the team are high. NASA and the public continue to support the project at a very high level. So we're just going to keep driving until the wheels fall off. And they're still keeping you plenty busy. We had to delay this conversation a few hours because you had to get into a teleconference to discuss some stuff going on, I guess, with Spirit. Yeah, we actually were planning four or five days of observations over the Thanksgiving holiday

so that a lot of people on the team can take some well-deserved rest and time off. Well, keep taking those spectacular images with the Pan Cam, and we look forward to much more from the Mars Exploration Rovers as they continue to roll around the Red Planet. And just one last question. Did you have any idea back there in high school photography club that it would get you this far? No, not at all. I have always loved landscape photography,

but I had no idea that this is the kind of landscape I'd end up photographing. Just one more comment to the folks in the Planetary Society and others that are supporting this mission. The team really appreciates the public support, and we put the images out there every day on marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov. People download them and make their own mosaics and panoramas and do their own analysis, and we think that's great. It's great to have the public along for the ride. We do, too, and we're going to put the link up to that site and coverage on our site, planetary.org, where some people may be listening to this program

as we continue our coverage of the Mars Exploration Rovers. Jim, thanks very much for taking a few minutes, and again, happy Thanksgiving. Thank you, Matt. You too. Jim Bell is Associate Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University in New York. Lots of other involvement with the exploration of our solar system, but in particular, as far as this conversation goes, he's responsible, he's the lead for the pan cams, those cameras that stand at the height of a human being and take pictures just as if one of us was standing on the surface of Mars.

We'll be right back with What's Up? and this week's installment from Bruce Betts' new trivia contest after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A. How do we know what the surfaces of different icy worlds are made of? It's the same way we know what distant stars are made of, spectroscopy. Spectroscopy is the study of the spectrum of light that is emitted or reflected by an object. Scientists collect the faint light from a distant world

and then they split that faint light into hundreds of even fainter beams, each at a different wavelength or color. Human eyes detect incoming light in three different wavelength bands, and that's what allows us to tell surfaces that are red from surfaces that are blue. But sensitive spectrometers can tell surfaces that are red at a wavelength of 720 nanometers from surfaces that are red at a wavelength of 730 nanometers. This tiny difference in wavelength has identified the presence of methane ice on the surface of Pluto and many other smaller, more distant Kuiper belt bodies. Spectroscopy is even beginning to help us identify the compositions of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.

Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We're on the phone for this post-Thanksgiving installment. Bruce, happy post-Thanksgiving. Happy post-Thanksgiving to you as well, Matt. Yeah, thank you very much.

It was a nice holiday. What do you got for us this week, other than leftovers? Well, that's what I was going to start with. We've got leftover planets. Mars is leftover from its closest approach, but still looking quite bright. It's starting to dim, but you can still catch it after sunset. Look in the east. It'll already be up, looking orangish.

You can still catch Venus for a little bit longer over in the west after sunset, looking like an incredibly bright star. And Saturn's coming to join the evening sky, rising kind of the mid-evening, hanging out in the east-northeast. And in the pre-dawn, if you're so inspired, you can check out Jupiter, looking like a really bright star, low in the east-southeast, just before dawn. And we've got, as I think I mentioned before, the Geminid meteor shower coming up, peaking on December 14th, but that will be during a full moon,

so it'll be tougher to see, but traditionally one of the more consistent showers with about 60 meteors per hour in a good dark site, which will be tough with that pesky moon, but still might be worth going out there. I'll have another meteor shower for you in early January. I'm trying to arrange. You're so kind. I know. I try. On to this week in space history.

It is the 10th anniversary of the launch of SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which studies the sun, not surprisingly, a joint effort by ESA and NASA, and has discovered all sorts of amazing things about the sun and continues to provide basically live coverage. You can go to their website and see the sun in all sorts of different wavelengths. Oh, well, maybe we'll put that link up. That would be a cool thing to do. Human space update. We had Bill MacArthur and

Valerie Tokareff. They were hot-rodding, took a short ride, just moving, oddly enough. The vehicle that they've got up there, the Soyuz, which acts as their lifeboat and also their eventual return. They moved from one docking port to another to facilitate a future

spacewalk, and that went swimmingly. port to another to facilitate a future spacewalk, and that went swimmingly. On to random space facts! You know, on Mars, there's no global magnetic field, at least as far as we can tell, and we've looked pretty darn hard. Unlike on Earth, where we have the global magnetic field, however, on Mars, there is much stronger crustal magnetism. That's where presumably a past, probably global magnetic field, when the interior of the planet was more alive,

a past magnetic field was frozen into the rock and creates these various crustal magnetic fields localized to certain areas. That's actually much, much stronger than any crustal magnetism we have here on Earth. I never knew that Earth had crustal magnetism. That's fascinating. So this is left over from, you know, when Mars still had more molten core? Presumably. That's the prime theory.

It's a little hard to check out. It's when Mars had a more molten, more dynamic core mantle system, that it was generating a global magnetic field. And when lava came out at that time, you have no magnetic field locked in the original molten rock. But then as it freezes, it freezes in the magnetic field, including the direction of the field, which is actually used on Earth to note that the magnetic field has switched over time and gone from north to south, south to north. And all sorts of neat stuff can be done with that.

Well, there also appear to have been switches on Mars. You see flips in the direction of the magnetic field. This also tells me that we're going to have to have a GPS system on Mars before too long because we won't be able to use a compass. That's true. It's true. On to the trivia contest. In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Planetary Society,

one of the founders was, of course, Carl Sagan. What was Carl Sagan's middle name? How'd we do, Matt? Well, it was Edward, by the way. We'll give you the answer right up front this time. And that came from Weston Williams. It actually came from a whole bunch of people, lots of Carl Sagan fans out there, and a lot of them had very nice things to say about our co-founder of the Planetary Society.

Weston Williams, I think our first winner, Bruce, from Honolulu. So aloha and mahalo, Weston. Shaka brah, and coming up on Mele Kalikimaka. and mahalo, Weston. Shaka brah. And coming up on Mele Kalikimaka. And if you want to win a glorious, fabulous T-shirt

and we're throwing in an additional prize this week, trying to sweeten the pot, we have a beautiful crystal bowl from the 25th anniversary dinner of the Planetary Society provided by our generous presenting sponsor for the dinner,

Northrop Grumman. And that bowl's got a spiffy old spacecraft on the outside and lots of Planetary Society working. And it's just, it's quite lovely. What do you think, Matt? Oh, I think it's great. This was a special bonus gift for people who came to the 25th anniversary. So you can get one of your very own, probably still gift-wrapped.

Probably, but we're not guaranteeing that. We're just guaranteeing the bowl, and we'll shove a Planetary Radio t-shirt in it just to make it classy. It's going to be tough to fit it in there, but we'll try. And to win that, answer the following question. Who is the only astronaut who flew as part of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, who flew as part of all three of those programs, go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter, and win a beautiful crystal ball with a T-shirt shoved inside.

Do it. And get it to us, get that entry to us by December 5 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And you will be entered in this extra special What's Up Trivia contest. Bruce, I think we're done. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up in the night sky. Think about palm trees.

Mahalo and good night. Aloha. He's Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week for What's Dr. Bruce Betts, Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week for What's Up. Aloha. We've got to go. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Join us next time and have a great week, everyone. Thank you.