Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - All Together Now! The News From Curiosity

Episode Date: December 3, 2012

Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger's fascinating comments at the December 3 press conference, followed by analysis from Emily Lakdawalla.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So what has Curiosity found on Mars? That's 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. As I record this, it has only been a few hours since members of the Curiosity rover team addressed the media and the world. We'll listen to project scientist John Grotzinger, and then we'll get on-the-spot comment from our own Emily Lakdawalla, who attended the briefing. Bruce Betts will be along later, but right now we'll jump directly to this week's visit with the Planetary Society CEO, Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy. Bill, I guess it's a couple of newsworthy items that you found this week, and you see a relationship between these two stories.

Oh, yeah. They're going to require, they, the powers that be, are going to require commercial space vehicles, these are people buying tickets to fly in space, to wear pressurized spacesuits, to wear pressurized spacesuits to supply pressurized spacesuits to their passengers which is quite a thing they're going to look like astronauts and of course virgin galactic is going to have them look you know how to say cool sexy that's right but then also i could not help but notice that it is reported by the instrument on the Curiosity rover, which the acronym is RAD, Radiation Assessment Detector. There's less radiation at the surface of Mars than people were, if I may, worried about. So if you were to be an astronaut in a new spacesuit, in a new fancy spacesuit, say with a more compact helmet especially, you would have no more

radiation exposure than people have in low Earth orbit, which is a surprising result. Mars doesn't have as much magnet, has virtually no magnetic field. You expect Mars to have more cosmic rays and so on at the surface, but there's enough atmosphere and Mars is far enough from the sun where it's not as risky as people suspected. Sounds like good news to me. Oh, man, because we're almost there. We're almost there. After that press conference on Monday, no, it's exciting. And it shows you that even though people have done a lot of research, you sent a lot of instruments to Mars, spent a lot of time in low Earth orbit,

this radiation question still raises eyebrows, still gets people interested. It's something everybody wants to know, because it is generally believed that the robotic exploration is a precursor, a thing you do first before humans go there. And the reason you want to send humans to Mars, humans are the best explorers we know. And somebody who flies on one of those commercial crew things is going to either go to Mars him or herself or their children or the children that they support through their philanthropy will go to Mars and perhaps change the world. Maybe two worlds. Well, that's it. Two – change the worlds.

Yes, Matt. Brilliant. Thank you change the worlds. Yes, Matt. Brilliant. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and he will join us again here next week. And then the following week, you'll hear him on Planetary Radio Live when we talk to the two guys who were running that terrific mission on Mars.

The morning of Monday, December 3rd, brought the press conference a lot of Mars fans have been waiting for. It happened in a large room at the San Francisco meeting of the American Geophysical Union. NASA had spent the week before tamping down expectations that had been generated when project scientist John Gratzinger told a national public radio reporter that he was looking at some data that would be quoting here for the history books. Speculation took off immediately. Organic molecules? Evidence of past life? Here's what Grotzinger had to say at the press conference when he was asked about the overwhelming reaction to his offhand comment. I was surprised. The first thing I thought was, gosh, I have to be careful about what

I say. The great thing about it is, as the days went by and I thought about it further, my reaction was, I think it's terrific that this mission has such wide appeal and public interest. You know, that's everything that I think we're hoping for. The mission has delivered an unbelievable wealth of data. We've had over 11,000 images returned that the public has enjoyed. We've had over 2,500,000 observations by the weather station. I could go on and on, you know. It's just been spectacular. And this team is going to have stuff to chew on for months and years to come. So the real news is that everything on a fantastically complicated and capable robot

is working and ready to do real science. Yet it must be said that the Curiosity team did announce that the miniature laboratory called Sample Analysis on Mars, or SAM, did appear to find organic molecules, though very small ones. Emily Lakdawalla will tell us more later in today's show. But first, here's much more from project scientist John Grotzinger. The instrument, SAM, is working perfectly well. It has made this detection of organic compounds, simple organic compounds.

We just simply don't know if they're indigenous to Mars or not. You know, it's going to take us some time to work through that. I know that there's a lot of interest in that, but the point is that Curiosity's middle name is patience, and we all have to have a healthy dose of that. And the reason why is I'm going to come back to our soil for a minute and try to give an example of that. As Paul mentioned, we basically took this material on,

and we had to do a lot of work to make sure that this was something that was sort of the garden variety typical Martian soil. We didn't want something that was adventurous, because if we thought that was the case based on our preliminary assessment using the APXS and the ChemCam instrument, if we thought we had something that was chemically going to be very difficult to work with, we probably would not have immediately put it into the machine. And instead we went through a very long set of triage experiments to make sure that this material would not undergo a state change and maybe evolve water or something while it was in the rover. So we were very, very careful. And this took

actually about a week or 10 days to work through before we could actually even do the first analysis. Being hopeful then that there was no gunk that we were passing into the rover, we went ahead with the next step. If I can try to capture everything you've just heard here as simply as possible, what we've got is a globally representative material on Mars that turns out to also be a rich repository of environmental process and history. And that is basically what we're trying to do with this mission as we go about assessing how to build environments. The soil has been our sort of practicing or proving ground for what we've got.

And we took something that we thought was a relatively average material, ground for what we've got. And we took something that we thought was a relatively average material, and as my colleagues have shown you, we've learned a whole lot more about it than we knew before. It is also the first fully integrated measurement for the mission in which virtually every instrument was involved in contributing towards the success of this operation. APXS and ChemCam gave us the chemistry. ChemMin gave us the definitive mineralogy. And if you go to Dave Plake's presentation this afternoon, he'll point out that there's a significant portion of this, which is X-ray amorphous, that Paul's SAM instrument was then able to tease apart, as he just described.

SAM, in addition, gives you sort of a global insight, really, into this material which is distributed. Everybody's heard of global dust storms. Now we're actually analyzing the material. What we learn here, what we measure locally, is actually applied regionally and globally in terms of what insight we get from that. The DAN instrument gives you a broader sense of the distribution

of hydrogen or neutron-absorbing materials in the subsurface that helps flesh out the story. The science cameras, as Ken showed you, gives us the physical structure of the soil. REMS, the weather station, turns out to have been very important because we learned from the Phoenix mission that when we drop off samples, if the wind is blowing, it may just blow your sample away. So what we do is we sample the wind velocity profile over 24 hours multiple times to see that time of day when we have the best chance to just have the sample drop right in to the instrument,

and that was 100 percent successful in every run that we did. And then finally, RAD, which is the instrument that gives you the radiation flux, as scientists get interested in understanding the inventory of organics that fall in from space or any other organics that are indigenous to the planet, radiation is one of the principal ways, it's a destruction pathway that takes those organics and reduces them to simpler materials,

maybe ultimately even deliberate them to form carbon dioxide that we would never detect as an organic compound. Now, the important thing about that is that for the first time, we have measurements of the radiation flux right at the place where we were sampling the soil. So you're going to expect to see a whole new generation of modeling studies, I think, start up from that. Okay, so now I want to move on to a somewhat different subject that we call our three months of terror. Everybody's seen that blue shirt moment where everybody was jumping up and down celebrating the successful EDL system. Ours really isn't so much three months of terror as it is three months of tension. Every day we turn on an instrument. We do the electrical baseline check. It looks like it's going to work,

but you don't really know what it's going to work until it's actually done a measurement. And then once you've done the measurement, you wonder how well it's done compared to all the calibration and baseline testing that you've done before you launched the spacecraft. And so each day we go through that, and as we turn these on, as one of our team members from Texas decided to call them, we have a hooting and hollering moment, and everybody's jumping up and down in the science team, and we get all excited about that. But in the end, what basically happens, and with the SAM instrument in particular, SAM just comes last. It's at the end of the sample processing chain. It's also an extremely complicated instrument. It's practically its own mission. And when it works for the first time, we have a

hooting and hollering moment. But when it works for the second time, you get something that all scientists live by, which is a repeat analysis. You see that what you saw the first time is probably not going to go away. And then when you do the third sample and the configuration is pretty much the same it was the first time, you believe maybe this just might be one for the history books, that this is going to stand the time of test as a legitimate analysis on the surface of Mars. That's basically where we were at with that excitement by the science team. So the nature of scientific discovery, especially in this business, is also very important. We live by multiple working hypotheses.

As Paul mentioned, even though his instrument detected organic compounds, first of all we have to demonstrate that they're indigenous to Mars. Then after that we can engage in the question about whether they represent the background fall of cosmic materials that are organic in composition that fall on the surface of every terrestrial planet. And then after that, we can begin into the more complex questions of whether or not this might be some type of a biological material. But that's well down the road for us to get to. And finally, serendipity. As any of us that have worked on the Earth understand, on a planet that's teeming with life,

you can go out into rocks that are billions of years old, and the probability of finding something that is actually a sign of life, or even something as simple as an organic material, those discoveries are so rare that every time we find one, it makes it into science and nature. Every new discovery, new occurrence, is actually a major discovery. So we have to take our time, and it's going to take a bit of luck, but it is serendipity because we're going to think it through well ahead of time and go about this exploration in the most intelligent way that we can,

using all of our instruments. There's not going to be one single moment where we all stand up and on the basis of a single measurement have a hallelujah moment. What it's going to take is everything that you heard by my colleagues and all the other PIs that build all their instruments. We're going to pull it all together and we're going to take our time. And then after that, if we found something significant, we'll be happy to report that. So finally, then, where are we headed? Well, at this point, basically, our car is ready to go. This is a car that comes with a 10,000-page user manual that we also have to write as we read it.

And, you know, that's where the patience comes in. But we're getting closer. We're ready to go here now. We have one major test ahead of us, which is the drilling. And we hope to do that and get started on that before the holidays begin. And then sometime early next year, we're going to pack it up and start driving towards Mount Sharp, which is the reason we picked this site. And it has what from orbit looked like a lot of materials that we're interested in.

So we're going to load up the car with the science team. We've been at the gas station. We've gassed it up, checked the oil, you know, we're going to kick the tires around a little bit, but then we're ready for our trip, and that's when our science mission of exploration really gets into full gear. So, thanks everybody for listening. John Grotzinger, the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory project scientist, at a December 3rd media briefing.

Senior editor Emily Lakdawalla was at that briefing. We'll get her analysis 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 in 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 worlds. 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 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, and here on her cell phone is Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, as promised, we've got you after the main segment today because you were there. In fact, I think you've just stepped out of the press briefing room. That's right. And it was a very large room, which is unusual for AGU press briefings. There were seven camera crews there this morning. And it sounded like the AGU guys were just thrilled. They wanted to take full advantage of this and get in some nice thoughts about the AGU as well. But of course, the topic

was this announcement, really a progress report from Curiosity. And I'm concerned that there are still going to be people who report this as sort of an anticlimax when I think it was a triumph. Yeah, well, there's something to celebrate and something that we're not really ready to celebrate yet. So the thing to celebrate is the fact that the largest, most sophisticated, most complicated scientific instrument ever sent to the surface of Mars, carrying instrument analysis techniques never sent to the surface of another planet before, it works, and it works beautifully. The data that it produces just looks stunning, and it means that it's going to be a tremendously productive mission for years to come. There were these tantalizing, well, not discoveries, I won't call them that,

but findings of very simple, I mean exceedingly simple, organic molecules. Yeah, so SAM, which is the instrument we're talking about, is sample analysis at Mars. It's a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer. And what it's designed to do, among other things, is to search for and identify organic compounds. Now, when space scientists talk about organic compounds, they're talking about things with carbons bonded to hydrogens. Most people, when we're on Earth, when you say organic, you think life.

But when you're talking about it in space, it's actually not very likely that those kinds of compounds had anything to do with life. So you have to be very careful about that. So these very early results, they did actually detect some carbon-containing compounds, but it was sort of a surprising one. It was carbons bonded to chlorine, and what that likely means is that they found evidence for the perchlorate ion in the soil, which is something that the Phoenix lander found near the North Pole before, and this is a highly oxidizing species. And when you heat it up, it instantly reacts with whatever else is there. So it reacted with something containing carbon, and it produced these chloromethane, dichloromethane, trichloromethane, little tiny carbon-containing molecules that just have one carbon bonded to a couple hydrogens and a couple chlorines. There definitely was carbon present, which is very exciting, except that it's too early to eliminate the possibility that the carbon came from Earth.

And so that's the first thing they have to do is to make sure that this is not any kind of terrestrial contamination. Even when they've eliminated Earth, the next thing they have to eliminate is did it come from meteorites, which is also very likely. And only once they've been able to eliminate that can they say, yes, we have detected carbon compounds on Mars. So that's where it's going to take a long time to develop. Can they say, yes, we have detected carbon compounds on Mars? So that's where it's going to take a long time to develop. There was also some talk by Paul Mahaffey about biding their time before they start releasing some oxygen that they've brought along with them

to oxidize some of these samples, and it's going to help them take a look at this carbon? That's one of the many complicated kinds of little sub-analyses they can do with this instrument. The problem is that very large carbon-containing molecules, which are, of course, the ones that they're most interested in, they're very hard to detect because they're not very volatile at low temperatures when you get these other gases coming off the species, coming off the samples that they're measuring. And then when you get them to a higher temperature, they disintegrate into smaller carbon-containing compounds. And so it's really hard to tell if you're seeing some carbon stuff

that came from a really big original molecule or if it was just stuff that came from much smaller, less interesting molecules. And so one of the things that they'll be able to do is they have the supply of oxygen, and they'll be able to combust whatever is left inside their chamber, and then they can measure the ratio of heavy carbon, carbon-13 to carbon-12. and then they can measure the ratio of heavy carbon, carbon-13 to carbon-12, life has a tendency of turning that into a different ratio than you get from just natural samples. So that would be a piece of the puzzle if they detected a different carbon-13, carbon-12 ratio in these large organics.

But it still wouldn't be conclusive evidence for life. You would need a lot of pieces in order to make that story. Emily, just say a word or two about the question that you asked, because that seemed to come up several times again after you brought it up. I asked if the compounds that they were detecting were compounds that existed in the soil to begin with, or if they were all disintegration products of the molecules that they were testing. And Paul Mahaffey's answer was that most of them were likely products. You didn't have soil containing dichloromethane and trichloromethane and these other small compounds like hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide.

But probably these were all made from the breakup of much larger molecules, which is what their instrument is designed to do. So it wasn't particularly surprising, but I wanted to make sure that you didn't, say, have dichloromethane in the soil. They don't, say, have dichloromethane in the soil. They don't. There isn't dichloromethane in Mars' soil. What there is is perchlorate, which reacts with carbon compounds to make that product when it's heated inside the sand instrument. So, Emily, what is Curiosity up to next? Where are we headed? We're headed a little bit further down into Glenelg. Curiosity is returning some photos of absolutely stunning

looking rocks, all different kinds of rocks in this area that it's going to go investigate. And it still has one more major kind of operation to try and do for the first time, and that's to drill into a rock and get a powdered sample of rock material inside its two laboratory analytical instruments, SAM and TEMIN. And so they hope to find a spot to drill before Christmas. And then hopefully early in the new year, they will then hit the road and start actually moving toward the mountain. And the thing is that because they still have this one last thing to do, SAM was another thing that they had to tick off was that they really haven't even started their science

mission yet. It's only after they do this drilling operation and do that for the first time that the scientists will really be handed the keys and say keys and the mission will say to them, okay, now go explore Mars with this great rover that we've brought for you. And so the best is really yet to come. So far we've really just been reporting that things work on Curiosity, which is really great and important news, but there hasn't been a whole lot of science content yet. All right, Emily, we'll let you get back to exploring all the great science up there at the AGU. And next week, talk to you again, probably via Skype.

And in two weeks, we'll have you at Planetary Radio Live on stage with John Gratzinger and others to talk about this wonderful mission. That'll be fun. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. That's Emily Lakdawalla. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We got in trouble two weeks ago for being in Bill's office and breaking his toys. So we've been sent to our room, or actually Bruce's room. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society.

Do you feel better now? Well, not that we've been kicked out, but I have toys too. You do. You have really nice toys. Thanks. Yeah, I feel wonderful. All right, how about we talk about what's in the night sky? We've got Jupiter rising around sunset over in the east, looking big and stunning and bright. Well, it doesn't actually look big, but it looks really, really bright. It's that bright star-like object over there in the east.

We also have in the pre-dawn super bright Venus still in the east getting lower and lower, and above it is much dimmer yellowish Saturn. Coming up, the Geminids meteor shower. On average, the best meteor shower of the year. Peaking December 13th and 14th. Expect about 60 meteors per hour from a dark location. So from a dark location at the peak, you got about one per minute. And don't miss this one because viewing is going to be excellent due to its new moon.

So you don't have the moon interfering with it. We move on to this week in space history. 1972, Apollo 17, the last Apollo, launches towards the moon. And I saw that one sort of off from a motel in Florida. Is that why you were there? To see the launch? No, but we happened to be in Florida at the time, and so I watched it lift off on TV and then ran outside and watched it streak across the sky.

I can't talk today. I'm just so moved by Apollo 17. More important, you were older than I thought. I was a very little pup at the time. I was a wee bit of a pup, but it's the first thing I can point to with a crystal clear memory that relates to space. Because, you know, all those people

they always ask, hey, how'd you get into this? I don't know, but that happened. Alright, we move on. Random space fact. Really gotta stop doing those so venus it's up there in the pre-dawn now it it overtakes the earth in our orbit by you know it goes around on the interior going faster every 584 days and that's when it transitions from being an evening star visible after sunset to a morning star, which of course it's not a star at all. But that's when it happens. Now, of course,

right at that time, it's hanging out near the sun, so you don't see it at all. But there you go. We move on to the trivia question. And we ask you, what is the third most common element in the photosphere of the sun by weight, in case there's any question? How do we do, Matt? Yeah, you actually did get a question about that. Our friend DJ Byrne said, now, didn't he really mean mass? But you did say weight. Nevertheless, everyone figured out, I think, that it's oxygen.

That is correct. that it's oxygen. That is correct and mass would be a I suppose a happier term to use but it doesn't really matter which you use as long as it's you're talking about stuff in the same place since you're taking the gravitational force there but it yeah it's proportional to mass and that's what we care about. And our winner this week I think a first-time winner Chris Yule of Wappingers Falls, New York, which happens to be a very pretty place. I've been through there.

Almost got a job there once many, many, many years ago. We did. DJ, as I said, he gave us a very detailed answer and had some great jokes in here as well. But he took it all the way down from, of course, hydrogen, of course, through, get this, antimatter erbium. Is he pulling our leg? I think that's something that they fought over that in the Dutch East Indies, didn't they, a few hundred years ago? The erbium? Yeah.

The antimatter erbium. The antimatter erbium. The antimatter erbium wars. On a more serious front, I want to mention that Claude Plymate, who is at the Big Bear Solar Observatory, mentioned that indeed oxygen is third most abundant element there. But actually, there has been a lot of discussion about exactly how much oxygen there is. He even refers to a solar oxygen crisis and, and sophisticated and out here. I want to read this sentence to you as fast as I can. Sophisticated analysis, employing time dependent 3d simulations of convection driven solar surface

velocity fields and thermal in homogeneities have pointed to a surprisingly low oxygen abundance. I love science. And he of course referenced his paper that he was on. I love science. And he, of course, referenced his paper that he was on. So, thank you, Claude. But still, does not affect the answer to this question, just to be clear. Okay, what else you got, Matt? We got several people

who marveled at this. They didn't realize that there was such an abundance of oxygen on the sun, and suggested that because of this, they were ready to volunteer for a trip there, because they'd be able to breathe without a spacesuit, of course, so long as, finish the joke,

they go at night. We're going to send out a year in space wall calendar, and that is also what the person who gets the right answer and is chosen by Random.org. That's what you're going to get if you answer this new question from Bruce correctly. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, TRMM, just having celebrated its 15th anniversary, is a joint mission between NASA and what other space agency? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You have until the 10th this time, December 10th at 2 p.m. Pacific time.

That's a Monday just by coincidence. And be sure to tune in to next week's show. Now that we know what Curiosity actually found on Mars, I think you'll still wish that it was some of the stuff that some of you listeners told us that they probably found on Mars. Okay, everybody go out there, look up the night sky, and think about toys. Toys and more toys. I love toys! As long as they're not broken. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society,

and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Next week, the Earth-sized planet at Alpha Centauri. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the always curious members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.