Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Celebrate the Mars Rovers With Jim Bell

Episode Date: January 19, 2009

Jim Bell and Bill Nye talk Spirit and Opportunity in celebration of 5 years on Mars. Emily Lakdawalla's Q&A looks forward to a Mars flyby by the Dawn spacecraft.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is Planetary Radio, and this was January 3rd, 2004. Now 6 minutes 37 seconds from atmospheric entry, still awaiting signal that we are on the ground. No signal at the moment. Deep Space Network tracking stations in Canberra and Goldstone are still searching for the primary signal. Stand by. What do we see? Wait, wait, wait. Electronic cone set from the rover indicates that the rover has landed base pedal down, which means right side up.

And then, the first pictures from Mars arrived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Look at that! That microphone-straining pandemonium at the landing of Mars Exploration Rover Spirit was only the beginning. Three weeks later, Spirit's twin sister Opportunity would bounce down on the other side of the planet. Today, five Earth years later, we celebrate their ongoing mission of discovery. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Today we'll listen in on a special celebration of the rovers.

Cornell Professor of Astronomy Jim Bell is President of the Planetary Society. It's also fair to say he is the finest photographer on the Red Planet. The author of Postcards from Mars and Mars 3D is in charge of the panoramic cameras, or pan cams, on both rovers. Jim brought his three-dimensional slideshow to Pasadena last week, and we were there to capture highlights of his talk. Later, a Mars flyby Q&A from Emily Lakdawalla, and a festive What's Up segment with Bruce Betts. We'll hear some inspiring words from Bill Nye the Science Guy in a few minutes. Bill was also with us on January 14th to introduce the evening's main attraction.

Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the Planetary Society, Dr. Jim Bell. Thank you, sir. Good evening. Welcome, Planetary Society members, friends, guests, earthlings, others. It's great to be here. I'm in town with a bunch of other colleagues this week to celebrate five years of spirit and opportunity on Mars. And it's an amazing, amazing thing. Today is, in fact, day 1,789 of our 90-day mission on Mars. And the cool thing for you folks is that this is literally happening right here in your backyard, JPL. JPL is providing the leadership. People in your community, you probably run into them in the supermarket.

You don't even know it. Just a few hours ago, they were driving rovers on another planet. I mean, just an amazing, amazing thing. And I'm very, very fortunate to work with a lot of those folks. And I'm very, very fortunate to work with a lot of those folks. I work at Cornell University in upstate New York, where right about now it's maybe 15 degrees Kelvin. We have a team of about 20 people there. We're responsible for the color cameras, and I'll show you a bunch of pictures tonight that the PanCam color cameras have taken. And that team of 20 people, includes myself, many of you know Professor Steve Squires, the principal investigator of the project,

a bunch of staff members, a bunch of students. That group is part of a broader group of a few hundred people, including many people here at JPL, other universities around the country, around the world. A few hundred people that every day are interacting with these amazing robots, these projections of ourself 150 million miles away exploring another planet. So there's a few hundred people. And that few hundred people is part of what was originally five years ago about 500 people who day to day were operating the rovers on Mars and that 500 people is part of an even larger group of about five or six

thousand people who in some way or another were involved in designing them, building them, testing them, launching them, and operating them. So it's a massive enterprise and those of us who who are involved are part of this really big team. It's an amazing and wonderful experience. And I start with this picture just to remind folks what we're dealing with. This is Spirit, in fact, at Cape Canaveral just before launch. This is the summer of 2003. Beautiful, clean, shiny vehicle. You can see how small or big, depending on your perspective, the rover is.

The cameras that we control at Cornell are up here on this mast. You can see the people in their bunny suits and all that. And that's about as tall as a typical 10-year-old kid. Any 10-year-old kids here? Okay, any people feel like they're 10-year-old kids? In the back, excellent, good. So that's our perspective on the world.

That mast can spin around, and we've got two eyes up there, and I'll talk more about that. Solar panels, radio antennas, we get all our pictures back through radio. Six-wheel independent steering, power brakes, power windows, the whole NASA package. You can see there's just an enormous number of wires and gadgets on here. There's some stereo cameras down here. They're a little bit hard to see, two eyes right there. And so this is what gives us our perspective on the world.

And the irony about this picture is, you know, Spirit is so clean and everybody's wearing their bunny suits trying not to contaminate the rover. And nowadays the rover is just filthy dirty on Mars. It's covered with dust. It's one of our biggest problems is that this is all solar panel here. The sun gives us our electricity and that's one of our biggest problems is that this is all solar panel here. The sun gives us our electricity, and that's one of our biggest problems.

It's very dusty, and that blocks a lot of our power. Well, the job of the team between 1999 and 2003 was to take that rover, fold it all up like a Japanese origami puzzle, and stuff it into the top nose cones of two Delta rockets. And separately, Spirit and Opportunity were both launched about three weeks apart in the summer of 2003. And it was really a sprint to get there because originally our team led by Cornell had won a competition against other teams from around the country, around the world, to build the instruments and put them on a rover that NASA was going to send. And we won the competition for one rover.

And shortly after we won the competition, some of you may recall that both missions from 1999 crashed and burned. Two failed missions in 1999. And NASA got very nervous, putting all our eggs in this one rover basket. And so then NASA administrator decided to reduce the risk, sort of the old school way that NASA used to do it, send two missions. So they contacted my colleague Steve Squires and said, would you mind building a second set of instruments and launch a second rover?

And he thought about it for a nanosecond or so and said, of course, that'd be great. And so they doubled our work, and they didn't give us any extra time. That was the catch. So we had about 39 months, the team here and scattered around the country, had about 39 months to build two identical vehicles, and so Spirit and Opportunity are identical twins, although like twins among us, they do have their quirks and personality. Dr. Jim Bell, lead scientist for the PanCam stereoscopic color cameras on the Mars Exploration Rovers. We'll hear more from Jim, including an explanation of 3D imaging and why it's so important when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Sally Ride. When Planetary Radio continues.

I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail,

informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine.

That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're celebrating five years of Mars exploration by spirit and opportunity. Exploring New Worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're celebrating five years of Mars exploration by spirit and opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rovers. Jim Bell leads the PanCam team at Cornell University. Standing at human height, the PanCams peer out at the Martian landscape with eyes that are just about equal to our own. What's more, they see in 3D, which has proven to be a vital capability as you drive across the sands and rock of the red planet.

Jim shared some of his spectacular images with a large group of Planetary Society guests last week. He also explained some of the magic behind them. How do we get the stereo pictures? I mentioned that we have these two eyes and all of our cameras, except the microscope, come in pairs. So just like our eyes, they come in pairs. And we can use the arm to basically treat the microscope like two eyes by moving the arm back and forth. And so the trick is to use two eyes on the cameras to get stereo. And so we actually have a left eye and a right eye up on top of the mast. And we take two pictures. We take a picture with the left eye through a left eye camera of an area. And then we take another picture with the right eye, just blinking back and forth between these.

These aren't 3D pictures. This is just a left eye and right eye. And you can see how it kind of warps a little bit? That's a parallax shift. That's just a change of perspective. And you can all simulate this yourself with your own stereo cameras, your own eyes, by just holding your finger out in front of you and line it up with something in the background and blink your left and right eye back and forth. and it looks like your finger's moving, right? But your finger's not moving. You know your finger's not moving.

Your perspective is changing. And that change in your perspective between your left and right eye is interpreted in your brain automatically in your hardware into stereo processing, and your brain, therefore, knows how far away this is because it's processing that automatically. Well, we take two pictures, a left and a right picture. We send them both down to the earth and we put them into a computer program where we put the left eye picture into the red part of the RGB and the right eye picture into the green and blue part of the RGB. And this is a nice example to me. I can see it pretty well here. Hopefully you can as well. You can see a series of ridges here. If you just look at this with one

eye, it looks pretty flat. And you wouldn't know the challenges that are waiting for you here in terms of going uphill and down into this valley and back up that ridge and down into this valley and back up that ridge. Very, very rugged, difficult driving. And if you don't know it's coming and the vehicle starts to tilt up and tilt down, it's got automatic sensors that'll stop the drive. So you need some advanced notice of the kinds of slopes that you're going to encounter. And that's another area where the 3D imaging

turned out to be very helpful. Jim Bell shared scores of beautiful images with us. Most of them enjoyed as we wore our red and blue 3D glasses. One stood out from the others. This is an alien crash site on another planet. I'm not kidding. The aliens are us. You saw in the animation, at one point,

as the vehicle was coming down through the atmosphere, the heat shield came off and fell to the ground. Well, this is what remained of the Opportunity heat shield. We saw where it, we could tell where it crashed from orbit. We drove over to it. The engineers really wanted to see what happened to it. Springs and nuts and bolts and stuff all over the ground. We had to be really careful, but we kind of nuzzled right up to it, made a whole bunch of interesting measurements that will help them improve the design of heat shields in the future.

Layering is a holy grail to geologists, right? It means the environment is changing. Things are moving. There's some layers in these environments that look like they're formed by shallow water waves moving back and forth. So the geology, the minerals that have water still in their structure, the blueberries that are formed in water, the salty rocks, all of these things paint a picture of that little crater where Opportunity landed and unfolded that place three billion years ago maybe, being a beach, if you can imagine that. I mean, there was water on the surface, near the surface. The environment was warmer and wetter and more earth-like and

habitable. And that's a really cool result from Opportunity. It's probably our number one result from these rovers is that at least in this environment, a long time ago, we don't know exactly when and we don't know for how long, but Mars was habitable by our definition. Now, was it inhabited? We don't know. We haven't seen any evidence for fossils, for little things scurrying across the ground,

for birds flying in the sky. We haven't seen any evidence that there's any life there. We don't have detailed chemical analysis and isotope tools and all that kind of stuff to search for biologic evidence per se. But what we've done, the threshold we've crossed, is that the answer to the question, you know, was Mars habitable, is yes, at least in a few places. And that's an exciting thing that future missions are going to build on. Jim Bell also reviewed SPIRITS trials and accomplishments in Gusev Crater on the other side of Mars. You can learn much more about both rovers at planetary.org, but it's opportunity that has only

just begun its most ambitious trek ever. Our next target is Endeavour Crater. Bingo, this big guy right here. 22 kilometers diameter, 20 times the size of Victoria that I just showed you pictures from. 11 kilometers to the southeast. It may take us a year. It may take us longer to drive there. I mean, you know, we'll try to put the blinders on. We'll scooch down there as quickly as we can.

And you know what? Why not, right? It's the next big road cut, the next big feature to explore. We already can see from orbit that the geology is interesting. The chemistry is interesting. The minerals look juicy and interesting, so we're heading out there on the assumption that the rover's going to stay alive and we're going to be able to press forward and get there. What's going on lately? Here's the view out the front windshield this week. Driving across, we try to stay on this outcrop rock.

It makes it a lot easier to drive. We avoid those dunes that we can get bogged down into. makes it a lot easier to drive. We avoid those dunes that we can get bogged down into and here's one of the most recent 3d pictures of some of those layered rocks. Again as we're heading south we're continuing to encounter this salty layered outcrop rock which tells us that the the watery history of this area wasn't just a little flash in the pan in one spot it was extensive across this area perhaps extensive in time. And that's a big question. How long was it that way?

And that's what's going to be the subject of future missions. If you wanted to download some of the highest resolution panoramas available to wallpaper your bathroom, for example, go to the top Cornell website, 150 megabyte TIFF files, et cetera, and you can get a lot of great information at these other sites and of course a spectacular site to go to is planetary.org Planetary Society has a great blog

and other information and in fact how much do I want you to check out the Planetary Society well I made a bargain with some people some friends of mine tonight that they would join if I wore the silly Martian antennas. And so they did, and I want to thank them for joining and encourage you all, if you're a member, then thank you for your participation and your involvement,

and hopefully you feel a sense of involvement. As Lou Friedman said, the Planetary Society is heavily involved in this mission. Dr. Jim Bell, professor of astronomy at Cornell University and leader of the PANCAM team for the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit, and Opportunity. That website he mentioned with the high-res images, it's pancam.astro.cornell.edu. You can also find it and other online resources at planetary.org. By the way, there's a great story about the announcement of methane plumes on Mars at planetary.org. Could they be evidence of the inhabitants Jim talked about?

We'll close our special coverage by turning to regular commentator Bill Nye. As vice president of the Planetary Society, the science guy got to introduce Jim Bell last week. But Bill then returned to the stage to tell us about a particular feature on the rovers for which he played a key role. It was Bill who noticed that the so-called photometric calibration targets mounted on the rovers were essentially sundials. Bill, who had inherited a love of sundials from his father, saw an opportunity, as well as a spirit, and the Mars dials were born. There is a complete description of the Mars dials at planetary.org,

but you can see them in many of the images returned by the rovers, including one that Bill called attention to in last week's celebration. This is Husband Hill. And the thing that I find so remarkable about this picture and all of the pictures that Dr. Bell showed and something that Carl Sagan said to us many, many years ago, Mars is a place. If you were dressed properly, you could go there.

You could walk around. You could have a picnic. I mean, you'd want to wear something warm. It's very cold there. At the equator, it's barely zero, barely freezing at noon. And you want to take some food, tang, I guess, some water, and then very important, take something to breathe if you go there because they don't have anything. But down there, hardly just 7, less than a percent,.7 percent. Down there is the Mars dial and then around the edge, my friends, it says we built the spacecraft in our year 2003, it arrived here in 2004, we built these instruments to look for signs of water and life,

to learn about Mars' past, prepare for our future. And then it says, to those who visit here, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery. And that, my friends, is the essence of science. That, my friends, is why we get up in the morning, is to have that joy of discovery. Every day on Mars, we learn something new. Every day, the human understanding

of our place in the cosmos is expanded ever so slightly by exploring Mars. And so up there is this message to the future, is this message put in a bottle made of aluminum and screwed to the deck of these rovers. And I hope someday somebody in this room will go up there and have a look. Bill Nye helping us celebrate five years on Mars for spirit and opportunity. Emily is up next. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts at a mer-party. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers.

A listener asked, I noticed that for Dawn's flyby of Mars in February 2009, the spacecraft approaches from a position that's farther from the Sun than Mars. I thought this flyby was for a gravity assist. Won't the spacecraft slow down, not speed up, with this geometry? When people think about gravity assist flybys, they usually picture the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, which used Jupiter's gravity to boost them onto Saturn. New Horizons did the same trick, using Jupiter to increase its orbital angular momentum enough to allow it to escape the solar system, catching Pluto on the way out.

But there's more than one use for a gravity assist. The Dawn spacecraft is on a lengthy mission to rendezvous with the two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, which orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Its Delta II launch vehicle had plenty of power to get it to that region of the solar system. It's not distance that's the main goal of the Mars flyby, it's inclination. All the planets orbit the Sun in pretty much the same plane, called the ecliptic. But the asteroids can have orbits that are markedly inclined. Dawn's first target, Vesta, orbits at a 7.1 degree angle to the ecliptic. It's energetically difficult to get spacecraft far out of the ecliptic plane,

and gravity assists are one good way to go, although Dawn could have done it without a Mars flyby if it had launched a year earlier as originally planned. Before the Mars flyby, Dawn's orbit had an inclination of 1.8 degrees. After is 6.2. That's not the only trick being pulled with this gravity assist. The orientation of Dawn's orbital plane is also being pulled around the Sun to bring it into closer alignment with Vesta's orbit,

preparing Dawn for its eventual orbit insertion in September 2011. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Here we are with What's Up. We're in the lobby of the Boston Court Theater, which is really just a few steps from the Planetary Society.

And we just celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Mars Exploration Rovers with Jim Bell and Bill Nye. And here's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. What a fun evening, staring at 3D pictures of Mars. And we just missed the toast where Lou Friedman climbed up on top of a counter and everybody shared a taste of champagne here. There were some people on their head when he climbed up there and spilled some. Yeah, he got somebody a little bit damp, I think. He's a wild man.

All right, well, we want to get back to the party, so tell us about the night sky. You just whacked my son in the face with some papers. Sorry. Sorry about that. Just, gosh, after last week's rocket accident, now this? We're getting a lot of sympathy, by the way, for the terrible

rocket accident. Appreciate it. I was scarred. I was traumatized. All right. Venus. Venus still really, really bright in the early evening. Looking over in the west, it's the bright star-like object. You cannot miss it. It's hanging out for another few weeks up there. We've also got Saturn rising in the mid-evening in the east, looking kind of yellowish, high overhead in the pre-dawn. And pretty soon here we'll be getting some more planets start filling up at least the pre-dawn sky. Can I add one? Because I just

rarely do this, of course, in this part of What's Up. But Orion, at least for us Northern Hemisphere types, is so pretty. I so look forward to it every winter. Oh, it is. Orion is gorgeous. And here's a little Orion tip on the fly for you. Ooh, ooh, ooh. So if you can find Orion with the very bright three stars of the belt, if you follow the three stars one direction, they will roughly point to a very bright star.

In fact, it is the brightest star in the sky, Sirius the dog star. Woof. And double woof. And if you go the other direction, you'll see a little fuzzy patch stars kind of above the line that you've drawn. That's the Pleiades. More of my favorites. Thank you. All right.

We move on to random space fact. It's so loud over there, only one guy looked up. I know. I was trying to. This Spirit Lander, we've just been looking at fabulous things, and I probably mentioned this too, but it drags one of its wheels. It drives backwards now because one of its front wheels is not working. So one, it's weird that Spirit's driving around backwards on Mars.

Fortunately, they put in those rearview mirrors. And then two, it's turned out to have some benefit science, as Jim reminded people tonight. As it digs up crud behind it, they've actually found some layers of some sulfur-rich salts and other good stuff they wouldn't have seen otherwise. Serendipitous. Serendipity. Speaking of serendipity, let's go on to the trivia contest, which has nothing to do with serendipity unless you happen to be a chimpanzee in the 1960s. And we're just sitting around minding your business, eating bananas, and then suddenly someone wanted to launch you into space.

We asked you who was the first chimpanzee, not monkey, chimpanzee, to survive a trip into space and back. How did we do, Matt? Very nice response, and people learned a lot, not just because of the chimp who was the first chimp in space, but because they found out, as I did, about so many other chimps and monkeys and things, like the monkeys who went up on V2s long before this. First chimp to orbit, Enos, but the first chimp to go into space, Ham. Except that he wasn't always called Ham.

Wow. What was he called? Bacon? He was number 65, as several people pointed out. And he was also, I guess, informally known as Chop Chop Chang. But it became Ham after the flight. And Ham, H-A-M, Holloman Aero Med, which was the center that was doing this biomedical research and, you know, wondering if we could survive up there. Well, congratulations to HAM and all the chop-chop-changs of the world. And to Edwin Devers, the professor in Rio Negro, Colombia, the nation of Colombia, The professor in Rio Negro, Colombia, the nation of Colombia, who was randomly chosen today, had the right answer and did tell us that Ham's flight on January 31, 1961, made him the first chimp in space.

All right. Now on to our next trivia question so you, too, can win a – what are we giving away, Matt? How about a year in space calendar? That's a brilliant idea. Desk calendar, year in space, the official source of this week in space history. Learn a lot of great stuff. We'll give that away. If you don't win, you can go to planetary.org

slash radio, find out how to order one. And here's our trivia contest. Our friends on Mars, two intrepid astrobots Lego minifigure representations

gotten to Mars by the Planetary Society with of course NASA's help have you forgotten them? they're still there, they're still exploring tell us their names both of them both astrobots are on Mars right now. Give us their names.

Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. I'm not even sure I remember. We haven't heard from them in so long. They just got really busy. There's a lot to do up there. Well, you've got until January 26th, Monday, January 26th at 2 p.m. to get us those names of those two intrepid astrobots, and we're done.

All right, everybody, go out there, look on the night sky, and think about what you would do with a screw that you found on the floor of a 3-D theater. Thank you, and good night, and happy anniversary, M.E.R. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Does he ever screw loose? Apparently so. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Have a great week. Thank you.