Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Vacuum Cleaner on Mars

Episode Date: October 29, 2012

It’s called PlanetVac, and it’s an amazingly simple way to collect a soil sample on Mars. Or on the moon. Or on an asteroid. We’ll learn about it from Kris Zacny of Honeybee Robotics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sending a vacuum cleaner to 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. It's called PlanetVac, and it's an amazingly simple way to collect a soil sample on Mars, or on the Moon, or on an asteroid. We'll learn about it from Chris Zachney of Honeybee Robotics. You can also catch the video tour Bruce Betts got at Honeybee. Later, Bruce and I will tell you about two new contests, each with a very cool prize.

Later, Bruce and I will tell you about two new contests, each with a very cool prize. Bill Nye is traveling, but we've got Emily Lakdawalla with a new angle on the search for near-Earth asteroids. Hey, Emily, I guess we're going to be playing Risk today. Yeah, that's right. We're dealing with several aspects of space and Earth science that deal with how you try to figure out what kinds of hazards that you face and what you should do about them. This partly comes out of your blog entry from October 24th. One of the last that you'll be doing, based on our experiences at DPS, the big conference, you called this future impact risk. Really, I guess the question is whether it's worth tracking these things, at least in part.

Yeah, so there's a big question as to where you spend limited resources. You know, if we had an unlimited amount of money, we would just send a mission to every single possibly hazardous asteroid, and we would deal with it that way. But we don't. So we have to look for asteroids that may pose a hazard. We have to try to figure out if they actually do pose a hazard by tracking them accurately. And if we think they might, that's when we have to send a mission to tag it, verify its orbit, and possibly even do something about it. One of the more interesting presentations I saw was about an asteroid called 2011 AG5, which could pass through what's called a keyhole, a very small region of space close to Earth in 2023. And if it does, then it will come back to impact us a couple of decades later. And so the question is, should we be doing something about

this asteroid now? Or should we be waiting just to do more observations, which in all likelihood will show that its path does not actually pose any risk to Earth? So there is risk and there is risk. And we can point to the risk for scientists in some cases, based on a case that you review, a rather horrible story out of Italy. Yeah, this one has had geologists really scratching their heads for quite a long time. The short version is that some scientists met in a small village in Italy that was very concerned and frightened about recent swarms of earthquakes. The scientists determined that there was no reason to suspect any elevated risk of future earthquake in a region that was already at risk for earthquakes. A week later, the place suffered a damaging earthquake that killed 300 people,

and now six scientists and one public official are going to prison for giving false reassurances about the safety of that region. And it's an example of scientific communication gone wrong and a court that doesn't really understand the nature of avoiding risk. And a rather shocking and horrible finding by that court as well. Speaking of risk, let's hope that our listeners and everyone else is able to avoid serious risk in the terrible storm that's underway right now. That's right. And I think that we all should be very thankful for the warnings that we have received from scientists that have gotten tens of thousands of people out of harm's way.

And, you know, if they've gotten some of those warnings wrong, if they've cleared some people out unnecessarily, let's just be thankful that we had any warning at all. Well, all of our best wishes go to those scientists and everyone else who is facing this disaster in the making on the East Coast. Emily, thanks so much. Talk to you again next week. See you then, Matt. Emily is the senior editor for the Planetary Society,

also our planetary evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, a conversation about PlanetVac. Getting to Mars is hard enough, but it may be just as hard to scrape up or drill out a bit of Martian soil or regolith and deliver it to a science instrument, or perhaps to a rocket for a trip back to Earth. There is a new technology in development by a company called Honeybee Robotics that may make this task far easier. The Planetary Society hopes to support the development of PlanetVac. I recently drove to Honeybee's facility in Pasadena, California, to learn more about PlanetVac and how it will be tested.

After shooting some pretty cool video with Bruce Betts, I sat down with Honeybee Vice President and Director of Exploration Technology, Chris Zachney. Chris, thanks for welcoming us to Honeybee Robotics. Thanks very much for coming. Well, and we've had a good time because we just finished videotaping with Bruce out on the floor looking at all the really cool stuff. So, folks, you've got to go and take a look at the video

that we produce here as well because you really can't get a good feel for this place otherwise. But we wanted to catch you for the radio show as well. We're in your conference room, right? Yes. Nice graphics on the wall. Absolutely. This graphics shows essentially a history of honeybee robotics.

It starts with the Mars exploration rovers going back to the turn of the last decade, where we developed two rock abrasion tools for Mars Exploration Rovers. The rats. The rats, that's right. And you get those nice little perfect circles on that rock on Mars. The Martians say, what is this?

So these pictures, they're a little bit out of order because the next one, all know is Curiosity. You guys have a piece of that as well? Yeah, that's right. So Curiosity is another fascinating mission. We built two different hardware elements. It's a sample manipulation system for sample analysis on Mars instrument developed at Goddard. And SMS is essentially a carousel of 74 cups.

And each of these cups can hold a sample from either a scoop sample or a drill sample. I'm going to jump on to the next photo, which is, like I said, a little bit out of order because it's Phoenix. You guys helped make some history with this, I think. Oh, yeah. Phoenix was absolutely fascinating for two reasons. It was fast-paced. We were asked to build a scoop and a small drill for acquiring icy soil within, I think it was like 12, a year before the launch. Which is nothing compared to what it usually takes to develop something like that. Absolutely.

Usually, you know, for like MSL rover, it took three, four years for some of the instruments to be developed. So I used to look at that, what I still think of as a long spindly scoop reaching out from Phoenix. It must be a lot stronger than it looks. It is.

The nice thing about Mars, it has a very low gravity. So the arm itself doesn't have to support all its weight. I'm going to save that last photo on the wall for later. But we've got to jump into talking about the latest project that you're working on in cooperation with the Planetary Society, which I don't know what you guys think of this name, but we've come to call it PlanetVac. Yes. As in a vacuum cleaner on Mars. Yeah.

A lot of times when we go to Mars, Moon, asteroids, when you think about it, one of the biggest, biggest issues is not landing, but, well, landing is hard too, but it's essentially sample acquisition. That's where you deal with huge uncertainties because you have no idea what the sample is going to look like. Imagine you try to land onto something that you have no idea about or whether it has atmosphere. It would have been way more difficult than it is. So we're dealing with these huge uncertainties. That's why the hardware a lot of times doesn't fully do what it's supposed to do, just because you cannot build a single scoop or drill that can work in all these different formations. To solve the uncertainty and the complexity problems associated with all the

different drills we came out with a planet vac on earth if you want to work with dust you use vacuum cleaners right because they are super robust and and they work 100 percent not my vacuum cleaner but i'm sure yours does okay yeah so uh said, why not using the same or similar principle acquiring dirt on asteroids or Mars or the moon? First problem we had to solve is that on Earth, vacuum cleaners work on a suction principle. You essentially suck up dirt. Well, you can suck up dirt because we live in

the one atmosphere pressure. If you have no pressure, there is nothing essentially to suck. So we had to come up with a new way of using pneumatics in a vacuum. And we realized that the only way we can do it is by creating an atmosphere. So the way we create atmosphere is basically injecting gas into the soil. So now the soil is staying in this high pressure bubble and as the gas escapes into surrounding vacuum, it exchanges momentum with the soil and it blows the soil out of the ground. You can essentially do a simple experiment. Take a straw, put the straw in a ball of sugar and blow. And you'll find that sugar flies straight into your face.

It's a very simple experiment, but essentially demonstrates how you can use positive pressure to transfer something. So does this take much gas to be able to get a sample to where you want it? Absolutely not. Gas is very powerful in vacuum because the gas exit velocity or momentum is proportional to a pressure ratio, not difference in pressure. So if you have pressure even at, say, one atmospheric, you know, one bar, and pressure on the outside is zero, you can see that, you know, the gas momentum or velocity is extremely high. The gas exit velocity is proportional to a pressure ratio.

And very briefly, the gas, you don't have to bring a separate gas because there's already the gas you need on the spacecraft. That's right. So a propulsion system, they use a liquid propellant. But to squeeze the propellant out of the thrusters, you need some kind of a pressurant, a high-pressure cylinder. And that's provided by helium. Every propulsion system on a spacecraft uses high-pressure helium. Once you land on the moon or

Mars and so on, very often this high-pressure helium is vented to outside and lost forever. But you can tap into it and use it as a working fluid for Planet Vac. So the idea here is, what I think is a very elegant design. You get a spacecraft that looks maybe kind of like Phoenix. And it has three legs. Yes. And in the legs itself,

the feet of the spacecraft is the Planet Vac apparatus. So that it's already in contact with the surface. What's involved with the tests that you want to do? And you've got this big vacuum chamber right outside of the conference room here. What we found is that very often to convince people that your new idea is going to work is actually to build a scaled model and test it in conditions that the system is going to be one day deployed in. What we're planning to do, along with Planetary Society, is to build a scaled model of a PlanetVac lander, which could be, as you said, exactly the scale model of a Phoenix lander. We would embed sampling tubes underneath a footbed or underneath each leg of a lander

and connect the top end of the tube into a container, into a storage container for your sample. We'll learn more about PlanetVac from Honeybee Robotics' Chris Zachney in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from and are we alone?

This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together we can advocate for planetary science and dare I say it, change the world. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular 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. Planet Vac is the revolutionary new technology that may someday make it much easier for a robotic spacecraft to collect a soil sample on Mars or an asteroid. Chris Zachney is a vice president at Honeybee Robotics. He's also director of exploration technology. He is telling us how the company will use its unique vacuum chamber to test a scale model of a Mars lander that is equipped with the PlanetVac system.

Our vacuum chamber is 11 foot tall, so it's pretty, pretty tall. We can suspend this lender at the top of the chamber and drop it into the bed of regolith. It's not going to be just any regolith. It's a special, we call it analog simulant, and we have two. One is a Mars Mojave simulant which simulates properties of Martian soil and another one is JSC1a which simulates a property of lunar soil and that's very important to have these simulants because then you know that the sampler is going to work under these conditions. So now we're going to have, when you think about it, a lander with tubes, with a pneumatic system, with a container which could sit at the top of a, say, Mars Ascend vehicle or rocket or lunar rocket. You'd have the salt tubes underneath of a footbed and everything suspended above the ground, a regolith, you

know, simulant regolith. We can close the chamber, pull a vacuum. Within 15 minutes, we can essentially be on Mars if you look at the very low pressure. And they will have to wait probably another hour, two hours to be in a vacuum like you see on a moon or asteroids. And then we're going to drop this thing from the top and see how the tubes embed inside the regolith. Upon impact, the small trigger is going to open a gas, and we should be able to see the soil moving straight, conveyed straight into the container. And to make it more fun, we'll make everything out of a clear acrylic cubic.

So actually you can see how this thing performs. Very cool. I want to see the video of that or be here in person. Sure. How far are we maybe from being able to conduct this test? Very, very close. We have regolith, we have vacuum chamber, we have provisional designs, and now it comes down to essentially building everything together. And I know that a planetary society is going to be sending out a requests for support for this project.

And our company is actually prepared to also support this project internally. We'll have people, we'll have hardware, we'll have, you know, actually, hopefully my guys are not going to listen to this, but everyone within my team here in Pasadena wants to work on it because it's so exciting. But I'll have to see how many other projects we have. But it's super exciting. Everyone wants to be involved. And you can bet that all of us at the Planetary Society are very excited to be a part of this very innovative project. We'll just close with this because it takes us to that last

picture right over your head. You talked about this lunar or Martian or asteroid soil or regolith going into this container and there is a picture of a rocket bringing that sample back to Earth. That's right. Mars sample return mission. Very sustaining joke that Mars sample return mission is 10 years from now and always will be. And it's really a sad story because every time, you know, we try to pull it off, we do studies and we come out with a budget. The budget goes to NASA headquarters, then to Congress.

And it's always too high for what we can afford. I believe that now we are very, very close to actually starting on this exciting project. This would be something that National Research Council recommended as a flagship mission, as a next big mission that we should start on. It's not just one mission. It's a serious... It's quite complex. It's very complex. It's a series of three missions. First mission is a sampling mission that would go down to the surface of Mars and it would be a rover driving around like sort of like a curiosity rover. And actually the latest plan is to send something that's, you know something that's going to be the same size because we have all the designs. It would acquire a sample in terms of a rock core, maybe a centimeter diameter, six to eight centimeters long from selected rocks.

It would cache these 19 or 20 samples inside a cache. 19 or 20 samples inside a cache. Then another mission would land on the surface of Mars. It would deploy a fetch rover that would go down and pick up this cache with 20 rock samples or whatever it might be, put these cache of rocks into Mars ascent vehicle. Then a rocket would essentially launch these rocks to the Martian orbit. It would rendezvous and dock with a Martian orbiter. That's the third mission. That's the third mission. And this mission would bring back these rocks to the surface of the Earth through ballistic reentry. And a fourth aspect that people tend to forget about

is a curation facility that has to be top-notch, that has to be built, hasn't been built yet, that would essentially recover these samples and so on. So you can appreciate the complexity of this mission. You know, three missions, all of them have to work. Imagine that first two missions work, the last mission don't work, you wasted first two missions. Imagine first mission doesn't work, you can stop working on second and third mission and start again on the first mission, right? So PlanetVac or MarsVac, a hybrid of PlanetVac, could be sort of like a touch-and-go mission to prove that you can acquire a sample,

that you can launch a sample to a Martian orbit, and that you can return a sample back to Earth at the fraction of the price that the first mission with three components would require. Well, I am hoping that we see all of this happen, MSR, Mars Sample Return Mission, before too many years go by. We'll realize a great dream of planetary scientists for decades and decades. I also hope that PlanetVac is going to be that technology that picks up that material from the surface of Mars. Chris, it has been great fun talking with you and touring the facility. Again, people can take a look at the videos that you just made, giving a tour to Bruce Betts as we walked around here. Honeybee Robotics

in Pasadena, California. We will be right back with none other than Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. That's coming up in just a moment. Back from Honeybee Robotics, back at the Planetary Society, that is, with Bruce Batts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. What's up? Well, besides all the cool toys we got to see earlier today and you dropping your watch. That was my watch. Other than that, low in the west, reddish Mars near reddish Antares,

which is below Mars. Again, very low shortly after sunset. Tricky to see. But we do have appearing at 9 p.m. or so in the east is very bright Jupiter. And it's up high overhead in the pre-dawn. You can also see really bright Venus in the pre-dawn low in the east. November 13th, looking a little ahead, total solar eclipse visible in northern Australia and the South Pacific. Partial eclipse will be visible in eastern Australia and New Zealand and throughout the South Pacific.

Check it out. We move on to this week in space history. 1957, Sputnik 2, the launch of brave Laika. Woof, woof, woof. Poor Laika. Poor Laika. Good job, Laika. Poor Laika.

Good dog. 1973. Mariner 10 was launched. And everyone survived that. Worked great and observed two planets. And it was great. We move on to in honor of leica kepler the exoplanet hunting spacecraft its field of view where it stares

for years on end covers 115 square degrees that's about 0.28% of the entire sky, or about, one place I saw it related to, about two scoops of the Big Dipper. Around 400 Kepler-like telescopes fields of view would be needed to cover the whole sky. I'll have two scoops of the Big Dipper with an exoplanet on top. We're okay. We move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, what planets did the spacecraft Cassini fly by on its way to Saturn? How did we do, Matt?

Easy answer. Well, only if you look it up or happen to know. But we do have our first winner, as far as I can remember, from the Philippines. Hey, cool. Our winner is Arveen Joseph Tan of Naga City in the Philippines, and he said Venus, Earth, and Jupiter. Indeed. Now, what he didn't say, but a lot of other people did,

is that it was twice by Venus, right? Couldn't get enough Venus. Two scoops of Venus fly by. Someone else, let me see here. Anders. Anders Brolin was one of the people who pointed out. Also, the Earth's moon and the asteroid Mazursky. Indeed.

So, very busy. And did you get Jupiter in there? Yeah, we did. Oh, okay, good. Sure, absolutely. Sorry, I zoned out. I just love this from Randy Bottom. Very quickly.

Cassini must be vegetarian. V-E-J. Venus, Earth, Jupiter. A little planetary science that you can sink your teeth into. Thank you. Alright, so we got more big

things for this next trivia contest. Yeah, because this week's contest that we're starting now the winner will be revealed in two weeks which is when we're celebrating our 10th anniversary. And so a special prize. Once again, those good people at Celestron have come through. Excellent.

We have another Celestron First Scope with the really cool accessory kit that we will give to the winner of the trivia contest that Bruce is going to tell you about right now. The 10th anniversary trivia contest. Oh, now there's so much pressure. None on you, on them. Oh, okay. I just should have had, you know, something extra special. Related to the 10th. Well, do that for our 10th anniversary show. Okay. I'll ask them about your shirt size or something, which is not the trivia question this week. Do not be confused. The trivia question this week, pretty straightforward. What is the orbital period, the length of a year of Ceres, the asteroid, the dwarf planet, the place dawn is going?

What is its orbital period around the sun? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You have until Monday, November 5, the 5th of November at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this answer and get your chance to win a Celestron First Go. But wait. There's more? There is indeed. Oh, that's exciting. So we talked about a little while ago, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, we want people to send us their greetings, their whatever you want to say, hopefully positive about this radio show, this radio show slash podcast. But we're going to sweeten the deal some. If you enter by calling, and all you have to

do is call and you'll get the My Voice going out on this extension, and it will say, leave us your message. The number is 626-793-5100. That's 626-793-5100, extension 226. Extension 226. And you'll get to that outgoing message, and you can leave whatever you want. Now, if you want to get more ambitious, send us an audio file. Send it to planetaryradio at planetary.org. Gee, that sounds like a familiar email address.

It does. When do they need to get those in by now? They've got to get it to us by plenty of time. Friday, November 9. You must get it here. I'll say 2 p.m. Pacific time. Friday, November 9 is the deadline. say 2 p.m pacific time friday november 9 is the deadline and someone who submits one of these special messages to us will get bill nye's voice on their answering machine no he's not going to

call in and leave you a message he will give your outgoing message how would you like the science guy to give out your message on your answering machine or service that serves that purpose. Hilda? Oh, voicemail. You probably don't like a voicemail. Yeah. So there you go. Leave us your message.

And the information is all at planetary.org slash radio. And we're done. Oh, okay. Everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about green, yellow, and brown bananas. Thank you. Good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

See his video, Visiting Honeybee Robotics. He's with us every week here for What's Up. Our 10th anniversary is just two weeks away. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the devastatingly attractive and brilliant members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.