Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Another Ray Gun Heads for Mars. We Hear It Working.

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

First there was ChemCam on Mars rover Curiosity. Now, SuperCam is on its way to the Red Planet aboard Perseverance. We’ll talk with principal investigator Roger Wiens about the new and improved, laser-firing instrument that delivers rock spectra and other science from a distance. SuperCam’s microphone will finally let us listen to the Martian wind and more. Mastcam-Z is right next to SuperCam on the Perseverance mast. You’ve turned it into great acronyms that we’ll share in What’s Up. Links and more are at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0812-2020-roger-wiens-supercam-mars-microphoneSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Another ray gun heads for Mars, and we'll hear it working this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of a human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Roger Reins heads the SuperCam instrument on the Perseverance rover. Its laser will heat up our search for past life, while its microphone will finally let us listen to the wind blow on the red planet. Our great conversation is coming right up. SuperCam's big eye is up on top of the Perseverance mast, sharing that space with the StereoVision Mastcam-Z. We'll hear your great attempts to turn that name into a NASA acronym in today's What's Up, along with Bruce's guide to the night sky.

Shining brightly in that sky is mighty Jupiter. A beautiful new view of the planet tops the August 7 edition of the Downlink, which also includes these headlines. Mars once had liquid water on its surface, but there may have been less than some hoped. A new study says most of the water may have been hidden under the surface in giant ice sheets. This could actually be good news for possible life, as it might have been better protected from radiation and other challenges. Back to Jupiter for a story we'll take a deep

dive into next week. According to a new study, the Big Bully may have prevented the formation of more worlds in our sun's habitable zone. Of course, we knew the early solar system was a dangerous place, what with big chunks of planet-forming material slamming into everything. big chunks of planet-forming material slamming into everything, China's U-22 has found more evidence of this below the moon's surface. The little rover's radar sees multiple layers of impact rock dating back more than 3 billion years. As always, you'll find much more at planetary.org slash downlink, including a chance to join Bill Nye for the landing of Perseverance in February of next year. A quick mea culpa before we proceed. I said in last week's show that the Super Draco rocket engines on the Crew Dragon capsule fire to begin the spacecraft's

reentry. Wrong. That job goes to the smaller Draco engines. The Super Dracos are key components of the emergency escape system. Kudos to those of you who caught this error. Roger Weans has joined us several times, but it has been a while since he last dropped by. Now, with the Perseverance rover on its way, he's back to tell us about the descendant of Curiosity's brilliantly successful and just plain brilliant ChemCam. As you'll hear, SuperCam builds on that success but promises much more. And it includes a tiny microphone that will deliver even more science as it lets us listen in on the red planet. Roger is a fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico

and a member of the lab's planetary exploration team. He remains principal investigator for ChemCam as it continues its work and has the same job for SuperCam. He joined me from Los Alamos a few days ago. Roger, great to be talking with you again. Congratulations on having yet another, oh, I have to say it, ray gun on its way to Mars. Oh, thanks, Matt. It's just great to, we're just jumping for joy. that next seven minutes of terror and that mast unfolding and SuperCam being able to start its work on the surface of Mars. How is SuperCam going to build on the success of ChemCam? They're similar in a lot of ways, aren't they? We certainly built on ChemCam when we designed SuperCam. So that's a very nice feature because ChemCam has done just an awesome job of exploring Gale Crater on Mars. But SuperCam takes the chemistry that ChemCam can do, and it adds two

mineralogy techniques, not one but two. And then it also adds to the imaging by making it color imaging. And then we have a microphone on board as well. Well, we're going to get to all of those, particularly that microphone. As you might imagine, since that's an old dream of the Planetary Society, that you're making a reality, or we certainly hope it will be in February. Take us back, though, first to Curiosity and ChemCam, which just celebrated eight very productive Earth years on Mars a few days ago as we speak. We're just past that eighth anniversary. It sounds like ChemCam has been able to accomplish everything you hoped it would and maybe more. Oh, absolutely, Matt. In fact,

well, let me just start with saying ChemCam is the large eye. It's like a four-inch diameter eye on the top of the rover Curiosity. It's like a cyclops eye up there, and we fire the laser out of that eye at rocks and soils up to about 25 feet away from the rover, about seven meters. The laser beam is a very rapid or short pulse with high energy, and it actually creates a small plasma, a little briefly glowing flash on the target. The telescope that we have behind that eye actually looks at the rock or soil and that plasma, and it actually tells us the composition by looking at the atomic emission spectrum. composition by looking at the atomic emission spectrum. And so by calibrating that, we can tell you how much silicon, aluminum, carbon, other elements there are in these rocks or soils on Mars. And we can do it without ever driving up to that rock or soil. We can do it some distance away. And in fact, the laser shock wave actually blows dust off of the surface so that we can get a nice clean analysis of that surface.

And then we get close-up images as well. So we do all of that with ChemCam. A laser broom, in a sense, in addition to everything else that it does. Yep. Tell me about the laser. Is it the same laser in SuperCam that you have in ChemCam? And how powerful is it? I'm tempted toCam that you have in ChemCam? And how powerful is it? You know, I'm tempted to ask if you can set it for stun. Yeah. At the landing time of Curiosity, we got some pictures on the Internet from, I don't know if it was people joking or enthusiasts, but they had some large explosion happening.

And so I don't know if they were thinking that this came from a defense lab. But anyway, we don't do anything like that. The laser itself puts out about 30 millijoules that when it's translated out to the target, it's about 12 millijoules. It is something that, like we said, makes a small spark. If we shoot a lot of laser pulses, we can make a small pit in the rock, but it doesn't destroy the rock by any means. It's just a very small pit, well under a millimeter, that is still great for us scientifically because it allows us to probe the very surface of the rock to look for weathering coatings or other things. And then we can also average together the spectra we get from that to get a more accurate reading.

So that is a neodymium KGW laser. It's a little bit unusual but it was built to withstand a fairly large temperature range on Mars. The SuperCam laser is almost exactly the same but it's the more typical neodymium YAG laser that most people hear about much more often. So it's a slightly different crystal. We found a different way to accommodate the thermal range. And so it's much easier to use the more traditional or more widely used on earth type of crystal. And it's, again, about almost exactly the same energy as the ChemCam laser. One of the things that amazed me about ChemCam and Will about SuperCam is this ability that you have given both rovers to sort of reach beyond their grasp. The fact that

SuperCam, as ChemCam has, will be able to target rocks that are, you know, pretty far away from the reach of the arm on either rover. And that has really been a very productive tool. I mean, it really has helped Curiosity do its job and will do the same on Perseverance, won't it? Yeah. Matt, we realized a long time ago, long before Curiosity launched, that if you can make a technique that is going to be easily usable out there, it's going to be used well and used a lot. And so we set out to use something not typical in the laboratory, but rather something that you could use without ever touching or driving up to a sample. Seeing a demonstration of that way early on, it just said this kind of technique just has to fly to Mars and be used. And sure enough, it's been very, very useful that way. Because you can imagine for other

sort of more typical laboratory techniques, you might have to polish the sample or get it to a certain size or whatever it is. We don't have to do that at all. We never touch the samples. And we can analyze them all around the rover. And so that's why, that's the beauty of this kind of technique. And we're really sold on this and that's why we're doing SuperCam and we've got other ideas as well. How often has the work that ChemCam has done ended up with results that made the science team for Curiosity decide, yeah, you know, there's a rock over there. We weren't going to drive over there, but maybe we should because ChemCam has made it seem pretty intriguing. Yeah, that's happened a number of times, Matt. One very memorable time was when

in 2015, Curiosity had just driven up a pretty steep incline. We got to a different area. We started shooting at some rocks in that vicinity, and then we're going to drive on. It just so happened that there was a team meeting of the whole Curiosity science team, and we were able to really talk about the results that we got and how different they were. It turns out they were very high in silica, like in opal for a mineral that was actually found there. And the rover team decided to turn the rover around. We stopped and we analyzed that whole area. And that was an amazing discovery because there was a whole layer of this silica-rich

mineral tritamite, which it turns out we have a lot of here in Los Alamos, New Mexico, because we're on a volcanic mountain made of volcanic ash. And that is what tritamite usually comes from. That suggests that there was probably some eruption that spread tritamite around in Gale Lake when this was a lake there, and that it's all settled to the bottom in one layer, and we just discovered that layer right there. But it told us what we think is a lot more information about volcanism on Mars,

and so there's a big story behind some of these discoveries. Nice work. Let's turn to some of those new capabilities that you have given SuperCam. I was surprised to see that SuperCam adds yet another laser to its arsenal. Yeah, the laser actually has two different colors that we can use with a single laser. Oh, it's a single laser. It is a single laser, yes. And so it does normally, sort of its fundamental frequency is in the infrared at just over one micron. So it's invisible to the human eye. We like to still show it as a red beam. of that. We can double the frequency or half the wavelength. So instead of 1,064 nanometers, it is then 532 nanometers, which is smack in what we see as green color. So that gives us the ability to use that laser for green Raman spectroscopy, something that's quite well known in the laboratory on Earth. We use it at a distance, which is very different, of course,

from the laboratory. And so we use some innovative techniques to allow us to do that, including an optical intensifier that we pulled out of the assembly line for night vision goggles. And so that allows us to do this Raman spectroscopy, not under the microscope or right up close, but up to a few meters away, just like we can do for the chemistry technique, the LIBS. That is fascinating. And something to do also with the fact that there are minerals that if you hit them with the right wavelength, the right color of light, they'll phosphoresce, they'll glow? Yes, the Raman spectroscopy is actually an immediate response. So while that laser is firing on the target and that's only

for a few brief four nanoseconds, four billionths of a second, that rock lights up with not only green light coming back which is reflected laser light but a little bit of other light. We have to filter out the green light coming back, which is reflected laser light, but a little bit of other light, we have to filter out the green light. And so we have two filters in our light path to get rid of about a factor of a million of that green laser light so we can see the other light because it's much, much dimmer. But what happens is that the molecules on the surface are effectively tickled or smacked a little bit, but not quite as hard as the LIBS laser does. They're not blasted off. We don't make a pit in the target at all with the green laser. vibrate and the vibration actually causes the light to come back at slightly different wavelengths

that are characteristic of the vibration frequency that those molecules are vibrating at. And depending on what the molecule is, what the end members are of those bonds, we can see the different wavelengths of those vibrations, be they H and O like you have in water or C and O like you have in water, or C and O like you have in a carbonate rock, or silicon and oxygen like you have in a silicate. And the relative masses of those atoms in the molecular bond give the different vibration frequencies, which then give us the wavelengths of light that we see coming out for that Raman spectroscopy. And so the Raman is instantaneous.

coming out for that Raman spectroscopy. And so the Raman is instantaneous. And then afterwards, we get an effect called fluorescence, where materials that are excited go to, briefly, to higher atomic excitation levels. And then sometimes they stay there for a while, and then they drop back down to a ground state or to a lower energy state, and that's called phosphorescence or luminescence, and that's a delayed effect. And we can actually separate those because we, with that night vision goggle intensifier, we actually pulse it very rapidly, and we can actually take exposures all the way down to 100 nanoseconds, 100 billionths of a second. And so we can separate the instantaneous light that we get in the Raman effect from the phosphorescence or luminescence or fluorescence that we get from the minerals as they shine or glow later. And that's really useful because that luminescence

can be an interference on the Raman signals, but we want to see them both. And so that way we can separate them out with this shutter that's really highly adjustable to these very, very fast time scales. That's one heck of a fast shutter. Is at least a portion of what you're talking about what I see when I go to a lot of natural history museums and you see minerals in a case lit in natural light and then it'll switch to an ultraviolet lamp and you see something completely different. Yes, and that's a fluorescence effect. So that is what we see. But like I was saying, the shutter that we use in our spectrometer can separate that from the Raman effect. Are there also things that SuperCam will be able to do without even needing to turn on the laser? Yes.

And so one of the mineral techniques that we have added is an infrared spectrometer. Actually, with ChemCam, we don't advertise it a lot, but we have a visible range spectroscopy that we do. And it has told us some interesting things about the oxidation state of iron in various places in Gale Crater. But a much more useful region of this passive color spectrum for looking at things, distinguishing things like carbonates and clay minerals, is the near infrared. distinguishing things like carbonates and clay minerals, is the near infrared. And so SuperCam has a spectrometer that covers between 1.3 and 2.6 microns in range. That's well above what we can see with our eyes, but there are absorptions in that range. And so if you just look at sunlight reflected off of rocks, in that infrared range, you can see darker spectral regions where light is absorbed by, say, clay minerals or by carbonate minerals. And so we

can distinguish them by looking in that spectral range. And that is our second mineralogy technique. You'll forgive me, I hope, for a second veiled Star Trek reference, but SuperCam, more and more as you describe it, sounds like the visor that Commander Geordi used to wear on Star Trek Next Generation. That was a multispectral camera. Cool, yeah. We've talked about the tricorder and so on, yes. Right, right.

That's Roger Weins. He'll return with more about SuperCam, including its Mars microphone, right after this break. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered. But to find them, we have to go into space.

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With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. Let's turn to an entirely different kind of detection. Something that, as I said, the Planetary Society has dreamt about for decades. You know what I'm talking about. We tried it with the Mars Polar Lander. The microphone. Yes, 1999. That didn't go so well. Nine years later, our next microphone made it to the red planet in one piece, was never activated because of fear that it could cause technical problems,

interference with other electronics. So now we're hoping, we're not behind this one the way we were the others, but we're sure hoping that this third time's a charm. Yes, we're talking about that microphone. Is it really a part of SuperCam or is it kind of an add-on? We were selected for the mission and then we started pushing for the microphone after that. We actually wanted to propose the microphone, but we were thinking of doing it as an outreach part of the mission or a student project and it turns out that at that time NASA

didn't have a category or a place to do that within the proposal. So once it was selected then we started trying to get it back on. We actually worked as a team to try to figure out what are the best purposes or scientific justifications for having a microphone on Mars. And of course, we all know it's just going to be great to hear sounds on Mars. But we really want to know that this is going to be used scientifically. And in fact, it is. Some of the studies that we've done were with the LIBS, the laser chemistry technique. I don't know if I spelled it out, but it's laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy that makes these little plasmas.

They actually make a sound. It sounds to us a little bit like a zapping sound. And it's just a little bit. Yeah, it is. It's not the laser itself that makes the sound. It's the sound of the laser. What happens to the target is actually this little plasma. The plasma expands supersonically at the very beginning when it's very, very tiny.

And whenever you have supersonic transport, you actually have a sudden noise. And so it's the little zapping sound that we hear from these little plasmas. Turns out they've been studied for some time. They've been used to check whether your laser's in focus because it gets louder when the laser's in focus and when it's out of focus, things like that. So we actually used it in the lab with ChemCam long ago. So now we're pursuing this dream to actually get it onto Mars and listen to the laser plasmas on Mars. The question is what's that going to tell us? Well you can imagine we're shooting at say two different rocks and one of those rocks is hard and we shoot a

burst of laser pulses and they all hit the surface and they don't really change the surface much but if we're shooting at a soft rock, we're starting to make a little pit in that rock and that pit gets deeper as we shoot more laser pulses. Wouldn't you know it, the sound actually changes between the first shot and the last shot when we have a little pit that we're making. And so we can tell, we can use those differences to tell us whether the rock is soft or hard. It's not easy at all really to see the depth of that pit because we're looking straight onto it. Any albedo variations or color variations can be very tricky, whether the sunlight is shining directly or something like that. And a little 100 micron pit doesn't really look like much in a dimpled

rock. Anyway, this sound is going to tell us whether the rocks are hard or soft. And that's a very important physical property that's going to tell us quite a bit about the rock that we wouldn't know otherwise from the chemistry or mineralogy. It turns out that the microphone is also going to be useful for the environment on Mars. We can hear the wind. And if you remember or think about walking outside on a windy day, when you're walking kind of straight into the wind, you get a lot of wind noise across your ears. But then when you're turned into or against the wind, you don't hear so much. And we can use that same effect with the microphone on Mars. That microphone is mounted right on the mast, the box right next to the cyclops eye of the rover.

So it's way up there kind of hanging in the wind. And so we'll be able to hear wind and be able to determine the wind speed and direction. We're not the only instrument to do that kind of thing. There's the META instrument, which is really dedicated to environmental measurements, including wind. But we'll be really curious to calibrate with them and see perhaps some different wind effects that we will be able to tease out from this microphone. So great science that will come out of this microphone. But you have to admit, and it sounds like this is where you started, it's also just a lovely romantic notion to be sending something that will approximate a human ear to the red planet.

That's right, Matt. And so we're just curious what else we might hear. By the way, I've got a recording here of my voice through the microphone. Let me see if it comes up. Oh, sure. This is the voice of Roger Weems speaking to you through the Mars microphone on SuperCam. Okay. And I've got a sound of libs going with the microphone. Oh, great. Yeah, let's do all of this stuff. Hey, everybody, I should say a little more about what you're about to hear. The first zaps are the sound of the SuperCam LIBS laser striking a target at normal atmospheric pressure on Earth. Then you'll hear how it may sound in 1% of that, or the 6 millibar pressure on Mars. Now, because that's understandably muted, you'll then hear the Martian zaps amplified by a factor of 8. By the way, we thank ISAE Supero in France for these What happens with the sound of that LIBS zapping sound is it's fairly high-pitched on Earth,

but the high-pitched frequencies on Mars are really attenuated strongly. The Mars atmosphere is very thin, and it's carbon dioxide. The sound actually travels very slowly through that atmosphere, and it's strongly attenuated, but especially the high-pitched sounds. Instead of zapping, it sounds a little bit like you're just barely tapping a tom-tom drum, so it's much lower in pitch. I suppose that, not that it would be a good idea to take your helmet off to try this, that if you were to try to let out know, let out a yell on Mars,

call for your buddy across the way, it wouldn't carry very far because it is attenuated so much. Yes, everything is shifted and the lower tones are heard and the higher tones are not. We expect to hear the LIBS plasmas only to a distance of four meters or so. That's about 12 feet away. Not bad, actually, when you consider you're going to be doing this in only 1% of the atmospheric density here on Earth. Before we go on, and I don't know how much you know about the other microphone that's being carried by Perseverance,

carried by Perseverance. But can you say anything about this other microphone that apparently may give us a soundtrack for Perseverance's descent to the surface? Yes. So there is a microphone that you could say will be used before the SuperCam microphone, and that is the EDL mic. It's the Entry, Descent, and landing microphone. So it is on, I think it's on a little camera that is on the port side of the rover, the left side of the rover, kind of midway to the back. It is going to be recording what happens as this rover is descending through the atmosphere, probably from the time that the heat shield is dropped and the rover is parachuting down, through the time that the retro rockets start up, and through the time that the sky crane is lowering the rover by ropes onto the surface of Mars.

And so I am so excited to be able to listen to that microphone eventually. Who knows? Maybe we can use that microphone with the SuperCam one to get some stereo sounds on Mars. I'm sure we'll be playing around. This gets cooler and cooler. The SuperCam is a great example of how international collaboration helps us explore the solar system. Can you take us kind of through its pedigree? Because I saw that different portions of it come from various places around the world, beginning, of course, with where you are, the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

First of all, ChemCam was an international collaboration in which half of the instrument was built in France and funded by the French government. Half of it was built in the U.S. and funded by the U.S. and sponsored by NASA, saving the taxpayer half the cost in each country. And each country sort of claims that as its own, and nobody fights over it. So it's just a really great deal. And we get to eat a little French cuisine from time to time. When the idea of the Mars 2020 rover was coming about pub in Covent Gardens in London with our French colleagues. We went on from there to design SuperCam a lot like ChemCam, and so we used the same international French partners. Then it came to deciding on a calibration target that would be on the back of the rover. target that would be on the back of the rover. The ChemCam calibration target, while people put a lot of work into it, it was almost an afterthought relative to the rest of the instrument and we knew we wanted to do better on SuperCam.

And so we asked colleagues in Spain if they would be able to help supply a calibration target. They joined us, saving us from having more expense on our side. And so now we have three nations that are involved in a fairly big way. But the targets that were actually used in that target assembly are coming from different places, including different laboratories in France, in Denmark, in Canada, in Spain, and in the US. And so it's a truly international calibration target set that we have on the back of the rover. I also saw that the sensor built into both KenCam and SuperCam is from this company in the U.K., Teledyne. But speaking of that calibration target, it kind of has interplanetary sources, doesn't it? Because I hear you are bringing a piece of Mars back home.

Yes. In fact, there are two instruments that are actually doing this trick. So Sherlock is also bringing a piece of a Martian meteorite back to Mars. So both Sherlock and SuperCam are doing that. Actually, the Mars meteorite, we have all of these meteorites on the surface of the Earth, which have fallen to the Earth. Most of them are from asteroids. But my actual PhD work was involved in determining that some of these meteorites are not just from asteroids, but a special few of them are from Mars.

They got blasted off of the red planet's surface with a large meteor impact on that planet, flew through space for some time and landed on Earth. Well, this particular meteorite piece that we have on the SuperCam calibration target was picked up in North Africa, in the North African desert, where it looked very different from the desert sands, Desert, where it looked very different from the desert sands, and it was identified as a Martian meteorite. It was actually sent to the space station for about a year, so it's already been out of the Earth again, and then it came back to Earth, and then we mounted it on the back, on our calibration target assembly, and now it is back in space for the third time. This piece of rock is experiencing quite a ride.

That is one well-traveled rock. I am glad you mentioned SHERLOCK, the Scanning Habitable Environments with Ramen and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals, which rates at least a 9 on my NASA acronym creativity scale. As you said, LANL, Los Alamos National Labs, your colleagues there have had a big hand in creating this other instrument that's on its way to Mars. Absolutely. So in the sort of infancy or dream stage of what we were going to do,

what we collectively, meaning the science community, was going to do for this rover. There was a team out at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including the ChemCam instrument engineer that was a very good friend of ours, Lauren DeFlores, and she was now on this new instrument team. And they were looking to figure out where they were going to get pieces of spacecraft hardware that had what we call heritage. That is, they've flown in space before, and so they're basically tried and true. Those kinds of pieces of hardware are very much preferred because we know they're going to work out there. And so she called us up and said, do you think we could adapt the ChemCam sensor and electronics for this Sherlock

instrument concept that we have? And we said, sure, we'll think about it. In fact, I've got a very good friend, Tony Nelson, who is our lead electrical engineer, and he's the guy who actually wizarded our way into the Sherlock instrument. And so Los Alamos built the detector portion and the electronics for it for the Sherlock instrument. And so we're very proud of that as well as SuperCam. As you should be. You know, some of your Los Alamos National Lab colleagues were my guests about a year ago. We talked about the lab's major contributions to space exploration that really are not all that well known, especially, you know, compared to facilities like JPL and APL.

You sure seem to be building on this. Yes, of course, we are doing whatever we can. And people here love to work on space projects. Los Alamos has flown over 500 spacecraft instruments over the course of time. And so we have a very large experience base. And we're looking to build new things for the future as well. It's quite a record. And speaking of records, Roger, I'll leave you with this. There's something else I think I should congratulate you on. You talked about getting to enjoy French cuisine every now and then because of the partnership you have with Canesse. You received a rare honor about four years ago.

Should I really have been calling you Sir Roger? Probably not. We don't usually use that. Thanks, Matt. But it's, as I read it, the French Order of Palms Chevalier, which is the French knighthood, right? That's correct. Yep. And I'll say it was good for a fun party. Actually, the French have many parties in Paris, so that wasn't so special to them. But we were having a team meeting out in Pasadena, California for the Curiosity

rover. And so we arranged to have a big party at the French consulate in the Hollywood area. And so that was actually a very special thing for all of us because who gets to have a party in Hollywood at a large house over there? So we had just a great time, and it was great to spread the joy and have a lot of fun with all of the team members. Roger, how soon after its arrival on the Red Planet will SuperCam get to take its first shot, quite literally, at the Martian surface? Matt, that, of course, will depend exactly on what happens or how the landing goes and all of the

details right after that. If all goes as planned, we would start to, well, it's like arriving somewhere and having to unpack, right? You don't necessarily jump into the pool the moment you get to someplace. You have to open your suitcase or bags and get out your swimming suit and so on. And it's the same thing with the rover. Okay, you know, we're just jumping for joy because the rover's landed, but then we have a lot of things to do before we can do all the fun stuff. Some of the very first things are that the rover is commanding the spacecraft right now. And so we will have to change software from flight mode to landed mode. And so that will happen early on. Also, the mast of the rover is stowed down against the deck,

and that has to get deployed. Once that is deployed and we get the software for operating on the surface, then you can imagine the rover has to look around, make sure that when we command the laser to shoot at a certain place on the surface of Mars that it is shooting there and not at the rover itself. And so all of those things have to get checked out. We're going to try to do that as quickly as we can, of course, but once those things are out of the way, then we're going to start zapping up the planet. So, you know, you can be sure we'll be getting to that as quickly as we can. So much to look forward to. Roger, once again, congratulations. Best of success to you, the entire SuperCam, and for that matter, Perseverance team. We will all be following along.

And I sure look forward to talking to you again about some of those results when they start to come back from SuperCam and that microphone that you brought along for the ride. Well, thanks so much, Matt. It's such a great pleasure to talk with you in the Planetary Society anytime. Dr. Roger Wiens is a fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where he is on the planetary exploration team. As he is for ChemCam aboard Curiosity, Roger is principal investigator for SuperCam, now on its way to Mars as part of the Perseverance rover. His 2013 book, Red Rover, Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration from Genesis to Mars Rover Curiosity is still available, published by Basic Books. We'll put a link on this week's episode page at planetary.org slash radio, where you can learn a lot more about SuperCam and the Perseverance mission.

Up next is our little visit every week with Bruce Betts. It'll be what's up. Time for a very special what's up with Bruce Betts. It'll be What's Up. Time for a very special What's Up with Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. Why is it special? Because we're going to be reading some of the acronyms that many of you sent to us for Mastcam-Z. I think that makes it special, just like you. Oh, you too, man. We're so special. How are you?

And what's up? Hunky-dory swell planets. We got in the evening sky, Jupiter, Saturn, over in the southeast. But up in the early evening, Jupiter looking really, really bright. Saturn to its lower left looking yellowish. And Mars coming up now not too long after those, an hour, two hours later in the east. Mars brightening, brightening as we grow closer to it in our orbits. We will get closest in early October. But it is already almost as bright as the brightest star in the sky.

Eventually, it will get brighter than Jupiter. It's going to be amazing. So keep your eye on Mars. And in the pre-dawn, over in the east, Venus just dominating super bright. It'll be hanging out near the moon on the morning of the 15th. That is your sky report. Jupiter has been really bright. And so if Mars is going to surpass that, well, I'm impressed. And if Matt's impressed, because he's, oh wait, you're actually very easy to impress. That's true. So anyway, moving on. This week in space history, this is impressive, Matt.

15 years ago, 15 years ago, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched. Still doing great stuff at Mars. What a vet that one is. It's special. Okay, you got me. I can tell. On to random space fact. The height of the Perseverance rover's eyes,

in other words, the Mastcam-Z cameras we talk about, is about the average height of a small forward in the National Basketball Association. Now, a small forward is a confusing term for those not following basketball since that equates to about two meters or a bit over six feet, six inches. This is why I'm not a forward in the NBA. Yeah, that's why. And they haven't put a camera on a mast on a rover at my eye height. There's so many comments I shouldn't make right now.

Thank you again, because I'm special. Yeah, please stop. Please stop. Okay, we move on to the trivia contest where I delved into theoretical hypothetical acronyms. Thank you so much that so many of you came along with me on this very strange journey. The stereo camera on the mast of the Perseverance rover

is a small forward named Mastcam-Z because it's a mast-mounted camera with zoom capability. So I asked you to make up what every letter, every letter would stand for if Mastcam-Z were actually an acronym. I was very pleasantly surprised, if not shocked, by how many of these we got. Thank you all. Fantastic work. And of course, as usual, we don't have time to read everybody's. But here are the runners up, okay?

I'll take Darren Ritchie's, who sent it from the state of Washington, which is special, by the way. Matt's awesome space trivia contest, auto-referential message zinger. He adds, I know it's really Bruce Bett's awesome space trivia contest, but bizarrely, there's no B in Mastcam-Z. Better blame Bell. Jim Bell, of course. Definitely the cleverest kissing up. If we gave an award for that, although there were other good kiss up ones, too, as well.

This one tickled me. Ian Jackson from Germany. Magnificent, amazing, stupendous, tenacious, captivating, audacious Mars zoomer. And you know what? You make it even better with that reading. That was great. Not to say special. Here's one from Jessica Heckman in Switzerland.

She says it's her first entry. And she says, why not try? She's a space geek. She hopes to be a planetary scientist someday. Hey, good luck with that, Jessica. We're glad you're with us right now. Here is hers. Marvelous atmospheric and surface target camera to analyze Mars zealously. Great work, Jessica. Thank you. I like that. It starts goofy, ends

goofy, and serious in the middle. It's kind of like an Oreo, I guess. Here's one from Mel Powell in California. Matt always says that comets are missing. Zoinks! That little Scooby addition was nice. Nice touch. Here's Maureen Benz in also the state of Washington.

She actually submitted a couple. Here's one anyway. Mars ancient samples teach children about Martian zeitgeist. Very good. And of course, it will. We're ready now to go through our winners. And the first of these we both liked. We're going to call it our realistic winner. Why, Bruce? Well, despite tossing in an extra word or two, it's the one that to me

sounded the most like it could be an actual acronym of a NASA instrument. Comes to us from, congratulations, Jonathan Georgievsky in Michigan. Mast-attached stereoscopic topographical camera for anisotropic mapping with Zoom. Sounds NASA to me. You need to read it in a more formal way. The mast-attached stereoscopic topographical camera for anisotropic mapping with zoom. Oh, that was marvelous. That was very special, indeed. Jonathan, you will have your choice of that Planetary Society 40th anniversary t-shirt, the one that shows the positions of all kinds of bodies in our solar system on the day the Planetary Society was founded, or, and it's your choice, the classic,

the iconic Planetary Society, Caravelle in Space, our original logo of that ship in space. They're both pretty cool. Here is our other winner. We had a realistic winner. Here's the surrealistic winner. It comes to us from Torsten Zimmer in Germany, and he submitted really several excellent ones. But here's the one that Bruce and I both like the most. Might actually see turtles, cockroaches, and Martian zebras. Would you call that the surrealistic winner? I think that was nice. Yeah. Thank you. Torsten, by the way, you'll have your choice of those t-shirts as well. Anybody wants to check them out, chopshopstore.com or just planetary.org slash store. Dave Fairchild, our poet laureate in Kansas. Up there on Mars, Curiosity rover is searching for smectites and other cool stuff. It has a camera that tracks where we travel and warns us of times when the surface

gets rough. It has a name that is really an acronym. I know the secret, but don't like to brag. Masterful Aperture Science Transmitter of Carefully Analyzed Martian Zigzags. Wonderful poem. The only problem, of course, is that it's not on Curiosity. It's on the upcoming Perseverance 2020 Mars rover, but nevertheless, great work, Dave. Again, thank you to all of you who took the trouble to come up with these and submit them to us this time. We're going to move on to another contest. For something a little more concrete, what is the wavelength of the SuperCam laser

you've been hearing about, SuperCam on the Perseverance rover? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Oh, and if you were listening carefully to this week's guest, Roger Wiens, you are ahead of the game, aren't you? All right, you have until the 19th, August 19th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And I goofed last week. I completely forgot. I mean, here we

had Lou Friedman on the show talking about his book, and I forgot that we have a copy to give away. So we're going to do it this week. Planetary Adventures from Moscow to Mars from Page Publishing, written by, reminiscences, a memoir from Bruce and my original boss at the Planetary Society anyway, Dr. Louis Friedman. All those great stories that we talked about last week, they're all in the book. And that's going to go to the winner of this new one. We'll award that in a couple of weeks. I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about your favorite stone fruit pit.

Thank you. Good night. Avocados. I can't eat them, but I had to, you know, I had the pit, the seed. What would you call it in that case with an avocado? It's amazing. It's special, one might even say. He's Bruce Betts.

He's not happy now. He's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members who are all ears. You'll do more than listen to our show when you become a member at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverda is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser at Astro.