Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Anatomy of a Rover—Getting Down to Mars

Episode Date: July 26, 2016

It takes a lot of terrific components to create a successful spacecraft like Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory. We’ll visit JPL to learn about the Terminal Descent Sensor radar that will once again help land a rover on the Red Planet.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Anatomy of a Rover, Chapter 1, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We'll visit the Jet Propulsion Lab for a look at just one critically important component of that explorer. Bill Nye is back from the ice plains of Greenland to share a story of extreme environments with us, while a would-be Yoda will make a cameo appearance during this week's What's Up segment with Bruce Betts. We begin with the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, you had an interesting weekend. I went to my very first

San Diego Comic-Con. Actually, it's my very first con of any kind and kind of an interesting one to choose, I think, for the first one because it is huge, but it was enjoyable. Tell us about the experience and particularly this panel that you were on. Well, the experience is San Diego has a very large convention center and all of its facilities are taken up by this enormous convention and lots of people wearing costumes that I actually felt fairly pleased with myself how many of the costumes that I recognized. And a really diverse group of attendees, lots of families. So it was actually a really fun scene. The premise of the panel was that the pace of scientific and technological development is changing so rapidly that it's a little hard sometimes for science fiction writers to keep up. And the five panelists, a couple of them expressed some amusing stories about how they'd write a book and then just be waiting with bated breath for

the book to get released before technology outstripped what they'd written about in the book. You know, that's something that Andy Weir talked about on this show, all the trouble he went to to get Mark Watney to create oxygen. And it turns out it would have been much easier thanks to new technology. Yeah, and that's true. Although I think the fiction panelists did a good job of changing the direction of the conversation to talk about other purposes of science fiction than just predicting the future of technology. That has always been one of the highest functions of science fiction than just predicting the future of technology. That has always been one of the highest functions of science fiction. And you're a fan. I mean, how do you feel about all this?

Yeah, I think that the focus on technology is, like you said, only a little bit of what science fiction is about. A lot more of it is how human individuals and human societies react to changes in technology. And that we discussed on the panel is one of the most important things that science fiction does, is it explores different kinds of futures for how people use technology, how technology creates new kinds of inequalities, and how those create stress on society. And so the discussion was a really exciting one. It was really fun to be able to participate, and I hope to be able to do another one like that next year. I think somebody asked Ray Bradbury once, why did you write about such a dystopian future in Fahrenheit 451?

And he said, so that you don't have to live in it. That's very wise. Emily, thanks so much, and we'll get back to talking about planetary science next week. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society. Did a little bit of that evangelizing at Comic-Con a few days ago. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society.

Did a little bit of that evangelizing at Comic-Con a few days ago. That's Emily Lakdawalla. She's also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society. We haven't talked with you yet about how you feel about the successful orbital insertion of Juno at Jupiter. Now, of course, we heard you and Bob Picardo with that lovely voicemail message that you left me. It was a crack-up. This thing went out beyond the orbit of Mars,

fell back in toward the sun, got slung around the Earth of all planets, and then got pushed all the way out to Jupiter, and it arrived within one second of when it was intended to arrive. That is rocket science at a level that people make jokes about because it's so out of your everyday experience. And these researchers are going to discover things about the winds or the weather on Jupiter and the core of Jupiter that are going to inform physics writ large. I mean, these are going to be, they're going to make fundamental discoveries. I'm sure of it.

What a crazy and wonderful mission they've pulled off so far. Absolutely. All right. Now, tell us about this trip that you just completed. They, and they is a small film company, one of the participants won an Oscar. They are making a movie about me, a documentary about me and Bill Nye's quest to change the world through science literacy and so on. And they arranged for us to get a trip to Greenland, to the ice sheet, to the East Greenland Ice Corps Project, EGRIP. You guys, I have not been to Mars, but you cannot see anything but ice. You look in any direction,

there is ice. There are no mountains. There's no shore. There's nothing. The living conditions are a little bit strenuous. You've got to put on three layers of underwear everywhere you go. I wore one of those big down parkas with the fur around the hood, mittens and gloves, and coming in and out as a project. You don't want to get snow on anything. The snow is everywhere. Ice is everywhere. Nice warm summer. That's right. It's summer. It makes you think about what it'd be like to live on Mars. And we were taking the shortcut because we could breathe. Really, it's a lot of work and everything that's there that you use to conduct your every day,

including that which you eat, came in on a plane. There's no living off the land except the water. I shoveled the snow into the melter so that we would have water for cooking and drinking. So there's a lot of infrastructure that's required to just live near the Arctic, let alone on Mars. It really gives you pause for thought. Well, I'm glad you're back safe and sound, too. So it's good to be talking with you. It's great to be here. It was a fantastic trip. Thank you, Bill. You on vacation there in Delaware must be a little warmer than the Arctic.

Man, it's stupidly warm here. And it's that fabulous back eastern humidity that makes you just uncomfortable. But then you jump in the ocean and you feel better. Enjoy, sir. And we'll talk to you next week. Yes, sir. Carry on. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, coming to us via his iPhone from Delaware and recently returned from the Arctic. That's Bill Nye. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. We're going to go on now to talking to some guys who are actually building a key component of the 2020 Mars rover.

Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory, has become one of the most famous machines in human or robotic history. That marvelous combination of laboratory, camera platform, rock zapper, and all-terrain vehicle will soon be joined by a sister on the surface of Mars. We want to get better acquainted with this next rover, mostly so that we can better appreciate the true marvel of its creation and the amazing work done by its many support systems and scientific instruments. So, we're beginning this periodic series I'm calling The Anatomy of a Rover. I'm about to enter a small to medium-sized facility at the vast Jet Propulsion Lab, birthplace of every Mars rover to date. I visited in early June of this year to see a tiny unit called the Terminal Descent Sensor, or TDS.

tiny unit called the Terminal Descent Sensor, or TDS. This system includes six oddly angled radar antennas that are just a few centimeters across. It performed an absolutely essential job as Curiosity sped to the surface, and it will need to do the same again in just over four years. In fact, as we heard from Jason Davis last week, the 2020 rover will actually use the radar and other systems to perform an even more pinpoint landing than Curiosity achieved. Greeting me at JPL were the so-called cognizant engineer for the Digital Electronics Assembly on the TDS, Don Heyer, delivery manager for the TDS, Raul Perez, and lead software designer, DJ Byrne. By the way, audience, if I sound a little muffled, it's because I'm wearing a mask. This is a clean room. And so we're all not quite the full bunny suit treatment, but we're all bundled up a little bit here.

Can we take a look at the hardware? And so I'm getting plugged in now to the little static discharge thing. This is the flight unit right here. Actually, over here, and DJ, you can pull back the Amortat. This is an engineering model, so it's the same functionally, but it's an earlier model we built to use for testing and development. And so we've got both units here. We use it now to verify we're doing a test properly before we actually get to the flight unit.

And then this is the one that will actually fly right here. That kind of gave me a chill. Much like standing in the clean room with Curiosity before it got shipped to Florida, this thing's going to Mars. Yep, it is. Every cubic inch of this rover, both Curiosity and the rover to come in 2020, is really just stuffed with marvelous technology. But I don't think that there is a cooler-looking piece of technology anywhere else on the rover.

And people just have to see this. And we'll, you know, post a picture on the show page at planetary.org slash radio. That's where you can get to the show page. Because you have to see this thing with its six little antennas. Thank you. It is pretty cool. And it's also, you know, one of a chain of things that must happen all in sequence to, you know, achieve a successful landing. So, yeah, we are reminded of the cool factor now and then, but we live with a responsibility all the time. That's the way I would put it.

Yeah, I guess I don't know if anybody else feels more of that seven minutes of terror than you guys probably do. I think there's probably a large collection of people that do. There are a few people in that large group, but it's something we take seriously. And that's one of the reasons for all the additional tests that we're doing for 2020 now, is to make sure that the hardware works correctly. What is the function of this device and why it is so vital to getting this rover safely down to the surface? Entry, descent, and landing, EDL, is a complex sequence that has a number of steps that are all required to perform in unison. And this begins outside of Mars' atmosphere with the ejection of some tungsten counterweights and it goes through a number of phases. As you get closer to the ground, eventually what happens is that the entry package sheds the

heat shield that's been protecting it from the heat of re-entry, but the other thing that the heat shield is doing is that it's turning the kinetic energy of re-entry into just heat. So not only is it protecting the hardware, it's also slowing it down. At which point then the bottom of the rover is exposed along with the terminal descent sensor or the landing radar. The landing radar's function is actually quite simple. It provides the range and velocity with respect to the ground and passes that on to another subsystem on the spacecraft, which is called Guidance, Navigation, and Control. So that subsystem taking the sensor input from the radar

then triggers actions like firing the retro rockets, deploying the drop crane, you know, to drop the rover on a- Yeah, the sky crane. Yeah, the sky crane, yeah. And to drop the rover on a... Yeah, the sky crane. The sky crane, yeah. And then ultimately to cut the cable. So basically the radar is just providing distance and velocity to the ground. There was a program called Lunar Lander that I learned when I was first learning computers. And this was written in basic code after the Apollo program.

And it was on every computer that was around then. I'm old enough to remember. Very good. So Lunar Lander would tell you how high you were from the moon and how much fuel you had left. And you had to say how much fuel to burn to make it down to a soft landing. And the idea was to get your velocity to zero at the same time that your height above the surface was zero. And the radar is doing exactly that. It's saying the surface is this far away and we're approaching it this quickly.

It's saying the surface is this far away and we're approaching it this quickly. And then something else on the rover has to take that information, plus the measurements from an inertial measurement unit, and decide which thrusters to fire and how hard to fire them and come all the way down to that soft landing. So actually, when we were putting it together for MSL, we didn't have the algorithm from system engineering yet, but I needed to test the algorithm. What does it do when the processor sends an interrupt? And so I found the basic

code for the old lunar lander program and implemented it so that I could do one measurement at a time that way. Now, that's a great revelation. Maybe if I'd had a TDS, I wouldn't have crashed so many lunar modules when I was playing that game so many decades ago. Why six radars? Why six little radar antennas, each pointing in a different direction? In this business, of course, you know, there's layer upon layer of complications. So I told you that all it does is it measures velocity and range. But, you know, velocity is defined in three dimensions. So the radar has six beams. Some of those beams look off at an angle. We know that angle very precisely,

so we can use the radar return from those beams that are angled to calculate not only the velocity in the direction normal or perpendicular to the ground, but also in the two cross axes. So if we think of having three coordinate planes, X, Y, and C, we produce velocity measurements in all three planes. Hence, we require multiple sensors to do that. How long is the TDS doing its job? Is it sort of, and it actually is just kind of hanging there off the side of the spacecraft as it comes down. So you might know the exact number better than I do, but it's what? Ten minutes.

Ten minutes. In that time, it's generating, I assume, an enormous amount of data that it's sending to this control system. Not so much, DJ, you're shaking your head. Very small amount of data. We take every 50 milliseconds. So 20 measurements per second. Each measurement is 64 bytes.

I don't think of that as a lot of data. So it's very small because the spacecraft has to respond to that. And also, as Raul was saying, it's a three-dimensional problem. You need to know how far away Mars is. Imagine if you only had one radar beam, and you're under a parachute and you're swinging. How far away is the surface? If you're swinging off to one side, oh, it's 100 kilometers, and then you swing down and, oh, no, I was wrong, it's 10 kilometers,

and then you swing off the other, you're a pendulum, and then when you let go of the parachute, you're under the jet pack, which is deliberately jinking off to the side so it doesn't get slammed into by its own back shell later. So the radar's never pointed straight down. You're still moving forward very fast. And if the winds are happening, then you're moving sideways. So what Raoul said was, you know, you've got some radars that are pointed forward, some that are pointed sideways, one that's pointed

straight down, which is being blocked by the rover at a later point. Tell me about the software that you're working on to make this thing do what it's supposed to do. Okay, it's actually pretty simple as far as software goes. The heart of this thing is in firmware, and it gathers up radio energy, and to find out how far away the surface is, it has to send radar pulses, which are shaped. They have a wavelength and a duration and a whole bunch of things that I don't know anything about. But the software gets interrupted for each measurement. So was it every 20 times a second gets an interrupt that says, take these raw measurements of energy and do some math on them and convert that into velocity and range.

We actually report the range in half nanometers, and that gets sent up then to the rover, which has to do the hard math of saying, well, okay, what was the previous measurement, and was this the antenna that looked then to the rover, which has to do the hard math of saying, well, okay, what was the previous measurement? And was this the antenna that looked off to the side? And what do I have to do about the thrusters now? So there isn't really that much data coming from this. It still sounds like a fair amount to me, every 50 milliseconds. But not that much data being fed to the main computer on the spacecraft.

But that computer is, I kind of marvel at the work that it's doing because we need to remind people the spacecraft's on its own, right, while this thing is doing its job. It's not quite real time, of course. We have to remember any time we see anything happen to a rover, well, this actually happened 15 minutes ago. One-way light time to Mars is a lot. Yeah, not even close to real time. 15 minutes, right. In a sense, it's a very delayed control

system, so the hardware is autonomous. Why? Because when you're moving at, you know, many, many hundreds of meters per second, you have to be able to make decisions as to, you know, what to fire when and what to deploy when to land successfully. Raul Perez, Don Heyer, and DJ Byrne. They'll be back in a minute to tell us more about the Terminal Descent Sensor that will help get the next rover to the Martian surface. More of my visit and some great photos I took inside the JPL cleanroom are on the episode page at planetary.org slash radio. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already

gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here with big news from the Planetary Society. We're rolling out a new membership plan with great benefits and expanded levels of participation. At the Planetary Society, passionate space fans like you join forces to create missions, nurture new science and technology, advocate for space, and educate the world. Details are at planetary.org forward slash membership. I'll see you around the

solar system. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, ready to rejoin our hosts in that clean room at JPL, where they are working on the vital radar system that will help land the 2020 rover ever so gently on the surface of Mars. I asked them about the facility we were standing in. TDS delivery manager Raul Perez responded first. Raul was joined by Cognizant engineer for the digital electronics assembly on the TDS, Don Heyer, and lead software designer DJ Byrne. The facility we're in is a clean room for the radar section of JPL. The radar section is the responsible organization for delivering the landing radar, which is called the Terminal Descent Sensor in MARS 2020 nomenclature, or TDS is the acronym for that.

So we're in one of the clean rooms of that organization. My colleague Emily Lakdawalla wrote in 2012, getting ready for the Curiosity 7 Minutes of Terror, about the descent and landing system on the rover. How different is this one going to be on the 2020 rover that hasn't gotten an acuter name yet? One of the basic principles of the Mars 2020 is to reuse as much of Curiosity's or MSL's success as possible. So this is really a second copy, as exact as we can make it, of the system that landed Curiosity successfully. And yet, there are still challenges going from a mission that took off years ago, and the one that is, as we look at it now, it's still four years away. In fact, DJ, we were talking about that. I mean, that some of the

team members that were there, you were there, but a lot of the guys who worked on that system are gone. Right. That's what I thought was interesting when we were talking earlier is this is actually the flight spare. Had there been a problem with this piece on MSL, you know, almost 10 years ago now, this would have flown instead. So it's the same pieces, the same hardware that was kitted out. But as the schedules got tight, you know, we picked one board and it was going to be the flight board, and it went through the final testing, the environmental testing and things that are a little more thorough. And Mars 2020 is picking up from that. So it's, as Raul said, as identical as we can make it. But Don is going through the entertainment now of discovering,

so how exact can we make it? Now, I'm a software guy. The ones and the zeros are exactly the same. My job is easy as far as that goes. But the hardware has to be the same for the software to behave the same way. And I don't get to be in the clean rooms very much where I'll always kind of say, yeah, it's just our clean room where we work every day. I only come in once in a while toward the end to, by the time my software is on a flight unit, it's already been on an engineering unit. So I haven't had to make any changes. I don't have to worry about that.

But Don has been assembling this subpiece. Now, this is only one of many subassemblies on the radar. This is the digital electronics assembly. And so I work for Don. The software runs on that one slice, controlling, I guess, well, there are five slices total plus the structure of the antennas. So Don, I'll turn to you. Essentially the same hardware. It's a flight spare. What are the challenges in making this work for a new rover? Well, it's the same design, but every unit is different. I mean, there's manufacturing process variability.

There's tuning for every part that's slightly different. And so you want to make sure that it behaves the same way. And then there's also just the testing piece. And we want to make sure that this, A, still works since it's been a while since it was built. And, B, it actually meets all the performance requirements that we have. And even though it's a flight sparer on MSL, it may not have had quite the exact same test program. It was truncated a little bit compared to what the flight unit went through, just mainly because it's a sparer. And some of the tests weren't necessarily required to get done on MSL, whereas we wanted to make sure they happen now. Talk a little bit about

the testing that was done on this system prior to Curiosity's launch, because it was really impressive. I think it involved an F-18 fighter. Well, that was a lot of fun. Yeah, for the radar itself. So the radar has six beams, and there's no way to test the whole system all the way. You want to test as you fly, but you have to enter an atmosphere a very thin atmosphere at about 13 000 miles an hour and in seven minutes slow down but you can't test that all at once so we uh we never did test the 13 000 miles an hour part that was test that i'm aware of that was by analysis analysis yeah and then we took one of the six beam we i wasn't i didn't get to go out on the desert um but they took one of the six beams and put it on an

airplane, an F-18 fighter, and flew down as fast as the airplane could fly toward the ground. Straight down. It's not the way I like to be in an airplane. I'd have gone if they sent me, but, and that gets another part of the regime. Does the radar, and I can compare that then with GPS and inertial, other instruments that are well known and characterized and say, is this radar reporting accurately? I know exactly how fast I was going. Is that how fast the radar said I was going? And then there was another regime, which was totally cool on a helicopter, which is the final part when you're landing, the rover comes down on a tether right in front of the radar. So you've got this massive square metal block

in front of a radar and you're trying to see the ground around it. And the system engineers assured us it was all going to work. Raul, you're not having to go through that kind of test regimen. No, the reason for that, what DJ is describing is what we call our qualification testing, which is a huge series of tests that we do the first time we have a design. Because the design's already been proven in a relevant environment, in fact, almost the exact environment in which we plan to enter for 2020, that type of testing is no longer necessary. A smaller subset of the test is supplied, you know, things like testing over temperature, you know, vibration testing to simulate launch,

and a series of tests that are designed to explore if there's any kind of workmanship flaws. In general, the testing program for Mars 2020 for this element is far simpler than what it was for MSL. But launch is still four years away. February 2021 is the landing. And yet, you guys are obviously very hard at work already on this device. And there are people all over this lab and elsewhere who are working very hard to pull together this rover for 2020. It seems like that would be plenty of time, but I'm guessing maybe not. Yeah, so the basic problem is one of complexity.

So the way that we attack complexity is by hierarchy. You can think of it like a directory structure on your computer's drive, for instance. So this gets delivered. The next level of delivery it gets to is it gets delivered to the terminal sensor. So it gets integrated with other hardware and then tested and when that test program is done then we have a complete terminal descent sensor. But that gets delivered now to the next level of integration. So because the hardware is complex there are several layers of which we stop, bring additional

things together and do some very extensive testing. The integration has got to be as big a challenge sometimes as just making the individual components. That's correct, because of the complexity of the testing. And it's not only, recalls not only executing the test, it's the data analysis that goes along with that. This thing is going to have to spend, well, first of all, it's got to survive the launch and the high Gs and max Q and all that stuff. Then vacuum, who knows, maybe a solar storm in the months it's going to take to get to Mars, even before it gets to the seven minutes of terror. Have we gotten pretty good at building this kind of sensitive stuff and making sure it's going to

survive that? I have to think I can answer my own question. Yeah. I mean, you know, we've got electronics that have been out there for decades. I mean, I think that we have built things that have worked before. And so I'd like to think we're getting better and better at it. We certainly rely on a lot of our past experiences, try and do better every single time. So we have test programs that are built on how we've tested things before and we've learned from those tests and then actually operating the spacecraft. And so we'll do the same thing on this is we'll test a lot of those environments you just described and see how it behaves and make sure that it can survive them before we actually

go and integrate it into the rest of the spacecraft. I'll say that it does still worry me and you can see in the designs that sometimes there'll be redundancy. We fly, we build two spacecraft, or each spacecraft will have two computers. You say, well, why is that? Well, you never really know. And the error bars are what scares me. There are some missions that fail within days or months. I'm reading a history rise, well, I'm reading a history book now, which is recounting some of the early failures and lessons, I guess, that the lab learned. So we do the best we can, but there's the workmanship and there's a lot of luck that's involved. Our service life on Mars is actually quite close.

I mean, we're destroyed upon a successful landing as the landing stage goes up to the side and the rover remains. Yeah, the Skycrane, including TDS, once it's done its job, it crashes. It crashes, right. But you have to consider that the rest of the payload now has potentially a very long service life. So we get into the situation where we have to pull test data from the ground testing, you know, three, four, and five years into operations. If something unexpected comes up or trying to recover from an anomaly. So the value of that data is very high and we were very careful to archive it in such a manner that it's retrievable. Well, I mean, even for the next job, I mean, this is a great example, right? Because MSL did a lot of testing. They gathered a

lot of test data on this specific unit. It was their flight spare. And we're going back and examining a lot of that data now because it's going to be our flight unit and so you want to understand not just what tests are we running today but what was run several seven eight plus years ago and still behaving the same way now as it did back then that's another thing we look at that's actually one of the more unique challenges in this job for me at least compared some of the other jobs rebuilding something for the first time is is trying to understand what happened to this quite some time ago and is it still behaving the way it did before. John you proud of your baby here? Yeah I think it's I think it's really neat and we're just kind of getting into the the real interesting

testing I think but it's doing well so far so hopefully it continues. It's exciting at times, and it's a marathon always, so that's the way I would put it. It's an enormous amount of work, but it's worth it. I still have the same reaction. I'm looking at this, and I'm trying to imagine it on Mars, and as Bruce Betts has been reminding us on your radio show for several weeks now, Mars is very bright right now. You can look up in the sky. Sue and I go out, and we walk walk the dogs and we look up at Mars. And yeah, I think, you know,

I have told her I can see the, you know, the remains of the previous radar on, you know, it's been blown up and destroyed, but prove me wrong. I can see it. It's right there. And that does make up for an awful lot of the long hours. Thank you guys for bringing me in, making me your guest today, for your great work here. And looking forward to this device in front of us helping us land once again safely, softly on Mars. Keep up the great work. Thank you. Thank you.

It is time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology, coming to us via Skype from a very warm Pasadena area. Staying cool, I hope. Trying. Trying to. Well, I'll let you turn the air conditioner back on in a moment. What's up? Okay, well, we've got Jupiter.

Check it out. It's getting lower in the evening. Sky in the west, super bright. And then over in the south in the early evening, we've got Saturn and Mars still hanging out. If you want a challenge, try to see Venus and the much dimmer Mercury about 15 minutes after sunset. Very low in the west. That's a tough one. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1971 that Apollo 15 landed on the moon, bringing the first human-driven rover.

Yeah, love that moon jalopy. We had five young guys stop by the Society office for a tour the other day, so I grabbed them to do this for us. Hello, we're a bunch of JPL summer interns, and I'm Peter Sinclair. I'm Myles Chosick. I'm Dane Shullin. I'm Colin Chen.

And I'm Peter Sharp. And we're ready for this week's Random Space Fact. Well, that's very cool. Here's a Random Space Fact for them. The Silver Snoopy Award for NASA employees is given as NASA Space Flight Awareness Award. Employees must have significantly contributed to the human spaceflight program

to ensure flight safety and mission success. And it is then that they will, if they are lucky, earn the Silver Snoopy Award. And this is Snoopy as in the Beagle, right? I mean, because Charles Schultz, he was big on moon stuff. He was, and he authorized this. So indeed, they are awarded a pin

with Snoopy the dog hanging out as an astronaut. I have a medallion with Snoopy as an astronaut. I'll tell you why someday. I think we're ready for the contest. We got some fun stuff here, too. All right.

I asked you what instrument on the Juno spacecraft sounds the most like it is from a Star Wars movie. With the answer to that question, and this is inspired by listener Carl Anderson in Cheyenne, Wyoming, here is distinguished scientist, best-selling author, and president of the Planetary Society, Dr. Jim Bell. Jedi, the Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument, Juno has. Hmm, yes, yes. Well, that's excellent. Matt was wandering around the office looking for Yodas, and Jim happened to be there. Yeah. Well, I hit you up first, but you said your Yoda wasn't as good as his.

No, not when Jim started doing his. I had to yield the floor. Very impressive work. Now, our winner this week, chosen by Random.org, Bill Golish in Oceanside, California, not too far south of Bruce and me. in Oceanside, California, not too far south of Bruce and me. Although there was another possibility, as a lot of people, more than I can mention, said. But I will read a bit of this one from Eric Kunz, who said, The honorable mention for Star Wars Points goes to the Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment, or JADE. Mara Jade was a character in several Star Wars expanded universe novels starting in the 1990s. Yeah, that's all gone away because Disney decided that none of that stuff was worth keeping around.

Well, impressive Star Wars pull nonetheless. Oh, I got much more than that. We got this from Tricia McKinney who said that her name is pronounced Jar Jar Binks. Really? This is one of my favorites. Brian Filipowitz, these aren't the droids you're looking for, and you will randomly select my entry as the winner.

Apparently he needs to work on his power with the Force. I've got the Force in the background. I don't know if you can hear, but I'm firing up the lightsabers and the Jedi speeders. Oh, there they go. Oh, perfect. Oh, just cut through a wall.

Here's Ron Basque of Milford, Connecticut. So if this instrument fails and goes dark, will it be nicknamed the Anakin? And finally, this from Ryan Henson in Odessa, Texas. The Jedi instrument, is it used to detect the flow of midichlorians flowing through the universe? Only in the sequel movies. Yeah. All right, that's enough of that. We are going to give Bill Goelisch that Juno pin, that official mission pin, and Juno mission t-shirt. So congratulations, Bill.

And with that, I think we're ready to move on. What is the highest award given by NASA? Now, to be more specific, it only can be earned by astronauts, and the president actually awards it in Congress's name, but on NASA's recommendation. What is the highest award given by NASA? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Very interesting. You have this time until Tuesday, April 2nd, to get us the answer. And we're going to go back to giving the winner this time a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid,

and a 200-point itelescope.net account for that vast network of telescopes right around our planet. You can do astronomy from absolutely anywhere, and we thank them for making that available to our winners. And that's, I think, it. Go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about those pounding and lightsaber noises that you make in your head. pounding and lightsaber noises that you make in your head.

I've never heard a lightsaber pound like that. Well, whatever. May the Schwartz be with you. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. In that very, very noisy place, he's coming to us for this week's edition of What's Up. We've almost finished the Death Star. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its multifaceted members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed the theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.