Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Countdown to Touchdown on Mars

Episode Date: May 19, 2008

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. takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. This week we begin several weeks of special coverage. Phoenix has nearly reached its destination, not just the surface of Mars, but a spot that is well within the Martian Arctic Circle. With a successful landing, the spacecraft will begin to dig beneath the surface, down to where we believe there is ice, lots and lots of ice. For a status report and a mission preview, we'll listen in on a NASA media briefing that featured Phoenix Principal Investigator and past Planetary Radio guest Peter Smith,

Barry Goldstein, Phoenix Project Manager, and Ed Weiler, Head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Have you ever wondered how you could join the ranks of these and other planetary scientists? Emily Lakdawalla will get you started with this week's Q&A, and Bruce Batts will add his thoughts about Phoenix as he tells us about the night sky. Bruce also has a great Phoenix trivia question for our new contest. Bill Nye the Science Guy has the week off. Hey, speaking of Ed Weiler, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced a few days ago that the former Goddard Space Flight Center Director now has the permanent position

as NASA's Associate Administrator for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. Weiler was named Interim Chief on March 26 when Alan Stern resigned. Weiler will direct a wide variety of research and scientific exploration programs for Earth studies, space weather, the solar system, and the universe. The International Lunar Network. No, it's not a new Rupert Murdoch TV venture. The ILN will place six to eight geophysical monitoring packages on the moon. Each of these will be built and managed by a different international space agency. But all will work together to learn more about our big, round satellite. You can learn more at planetary.org.

Lastly, proof that you don't have to fly around the solar system or launch a booster as big as a skyscraper to generate excitement with a rocket. Listener Len Johnson leads a team of students from St. Andrew's School in Park Ridge, Illinois. You've got to check out their great nose cone video documenting the flight of their latest high-power rocket in late April. We've got a link at planetary.org slash radio. I'll be right back to begin our coverage of the Phoenix mission. of the Phoenix mission.

As I record this, less than a week remains before a 21,000 km per hour fireball will streak across the Martian sky. Retro rockets will fire, a parachute will deploy, and pulsing thrusters will, we hope, gently set the Phoenix Mars lander down on Mars. It should all happen just before 5 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday, May 25. The exact landing site should be in an ellipse that is centered at about 68 degrees north on the red planet. Controllers at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California, hope to get quick confirmation of a safe landing. But it will be at least an hour and a half later before the first picture is returned. Many, many more hours will pass before Phoenix begins a critical portion of its mission

by unfurling a nearly eight-foot-long arm. That robotic arm will attempt to dig down beneath the lunar topsoil to a layer of permafrost. Samples will be delivered to an ingenious miniaturized chemistry lab and a sensitive microscope. A meteorological station will monitor the weather on Mars' cool northern plains. All this will happen in a race against time, or rather, a race against the approach of winter, when cold and darkness will almost certainly spell the end of the mission. It's a very tall order, beginning with the difficult landing itself. Will it succeed?

This was one of the questions asked on May 13, when reporters gathered at sites around the United States to question leaders of the Phoenix mission, along with NASA Science Directorate Associate Administrator Ed Weiler. Dr. Weiler was asked if he wanted to guess at the actual chances of success. I have no idea of any way to put the odds on. All I know is that the Lockheed people, the JPL people, our university colleagues have done everything they can do, humanly possible, to make this a success. But Mars has been known to cause troubles, and I'll be

worried until I hear the signal a few seconds after launch. Landing, sorry. We already launched it, right? So I've seen both sides. I was there for Mars 98, and I was there for the two rovers, so I've seen both sides. I prefer the rover story. Did you hear that reference to Mars 98, otherwise known as the Mars Polar Lander? That spacecraft, which disappeared just before touchdown in 1999, is why the current mission is called Phoenix. The two spacecraft share many goals, design characteristics, and even instruments, though hopefully not flaws.

Barry Goldstein is the Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. He is as responsible as anyone for making sure that this Phoenix really does rise from the ashes. I can't put in words what it feels like to have it all come down to those, and I'll say 14 minutes after crew stage separation. What I can say, you asked about the team. This team is made up of a mix of people who worked on Polar Lander, who worked on 2001, and a mix of people who didn't. And those people who remain, who were part of the original teams, are the zealots.

Those are the people who really believe that if we could really work out the problems in this vehicle, we would have a successful landing. The other fraction of the team are people who were really, we purposely populated the team with people who were naysayers in the architecture. And I guess the biggest zealots are converts. And one of the things that we did over the last five years is get those people on board and really working hard to find the problems. Now, the fact that we found so many other issues relative to the review boards for 98, to me, is great. I was very concerned. I would be very concerned if we didn't. Frankly, I believe complicated systems have only undetectable bugs, and this

is a very complicated system. And the fact that we found so many is heartening. What's in there that we haven't detected, I don't think there's much left. I think we're at the mercy now of the environment and at the mercy of the reliability of the system. As I mentioned before, there are a lot of events happening in a very short period of time, and probability theory, even at a 99% reliability factor, tells you that it's tough to get those things to work. We'll break out our peanuts at JPL just before landing, so that's the closest we get to be superseded. The spacecraft's in perfect health right now. The journey has been so remarkably uneventful, it's scary how clean it's been. We had one anomaly on the entire 10-month journey. Back in, I believe it was October, we had a reset, or not a reset, we had what we called a

safe mode entry. The vehicle detected an error in the dynamic memory, the DRAM of the flight computer. And we know why this happened. We have a known susceptibility in these RAMs and memories that we've flown on previous missions dating all the way back to Mars Pathfinder. And the vehicle behaved exactly the way we expected. We went through the nominal recovery process, and we haven't had anything since. We went through the nominal recovery process, and we haven't had anything since. And by the way, the event we know occurred because of galactic cosmic ray.

Barry Goldstein was then asked if the demise of Phoenix is really and truly predetermined by the coming of winter in the Martian Arctic Circle. If by chance it comes out of that long winter, is there something built in that says, turn on the signal and scream, here I am just in case i'm not dead okay first of all let me say i think it's extraordinarily unlikely it will happen that that that's for the first point the answer to your question is yes we uh when the vehicle loses all power which it will in the long northern polar winter, it loses all battery power as well. When the sun arises again, energy starts flowing in from the solar arrays and will recharge the battery and the vehicle will then power itself on and go through its normal or nominal wake-up cycle. So yes, we have what we call a Lazarus mode where it basically rises from the dead. That could happen.

This would be really dead very. This would be real dead, Barry. This would be. There's going to be this much CO2 ice. I know. As I said, I did not expect that to be. Ice is a good return. Yes. I have lots of reasons why that won't happen.

Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein speaking in a NASA media conference on May 13th. When we return, we'll hear from Principal Investigator Peter Smith. This is Planetary Radio. 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've begun our coverage of the Phoenix mission to Mars

with excerpts from a recent press conference that featured mission leaders and NASA officials. Principal Investigator Peter Smith was among them. We first talked with the University of Arizona researcher on this show even before Phoenix got the go-ahead from the Space Agency almost five years ago. He's provided periodic updates, with his last appearance just before the August 4 launch last year. It has been a long, hard road from 1998's failed Mars polar lander till now, with a soft landing on the red planet scheduled for Sunday, May 25th.

Peter managed construction of the amazing HiRISE camera orbiting on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He now hopes for similar success with the stereo camera on Phoenix, along with all other aspects of this mission that he has overall responsibility for. By gosh, we spent 15 years developing the hardware that had gone into the 01 and 03 missions, which weren't going to fly, and I really wanted some return from those. So I had to take on an entire mission to do so, but that's what I had to do, and that's what I'm going to do, and by God, we're going to do so, but that's what I had to do and that's what I'm going to do. By God, we're going to get pictures and we're going to learn something about these northern plains that I think will,

my greatest hope is will change the direction of Mars exploration. With the amazing capabilities of the Phoenix lander, it has been easy for some to confuse this geological and geochemical mission with a biological one. Peter addressed that in this response to a reporter's questions. We have not designed the instruments as life detection instruments. We are looking at the minerals, and we have little ovens that heat the soil samples. And as we get to temperatures where, where say a carbonate would decompose

we'll see a little puff of carbon dioxide come out and by analyzing the gases that come out and the temperatures at which we see transitions we'll be able to characterize clays carbonate sulfates and other type of materials that are formed through the action of liquid water onto volcanic soils. And so we're looking for the changes caused by liquid water. We also do an experiment where we say, what would the soil be like if the ice melted? And because we don't want to wait 50,000 years for that event, we actually bring a little water with us, wet the soil, and we look at the chemistry of the wet soil. And this tells us about the kind of environment that would be available with the melted ice

and wet soils. And then of course our microscope looks at the shapes of the grains and the clumping of the grains and the magnetic properties of the grains, but not so much with the idea of seeing microbes but with the idea of looking at grain shapes. So we're really doing a full geologic and chemistry experiment on the surface with the idea of finding if this is a habitable

zone. In other words, could the organic materials be there, the potential of liquid water when the warmer climate exists, and perhaps chemical energy sources that some microbes on the earth use. Excuse me, Ray points out we're sampling ice also. And we have special tools to do so. And we'll look at the properties of the ice and and we can compare the properties of the ice frozen into the surface with the water vapor that's in the atmosphere to see if there's a communication there, if there's a exchange between the atmosphere and the subsurface ice.

Phoenix Mission Principal Investigator Peter Smith. Also at the May 13 media briefing was Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Ray chairs the Landing Site Working Group. He was asked about the long robotic arm that will attempt to dig down into the layer of Martian ice believed to be just below the surface. That more than two meter long appendage may look spindly, but it's actually quite strong. And it needs to be just that if it is to complete its piece of the Phoenix mission. The end effector includes a scoop. And in a backhoe motion within maybe four or five sols, we'll clean off the soil and expose the ice table. But the ice table, you know, will be very cold and it will be very hard. So there is the blade on the

front of the scoop. There's also a blade that extends from the bottom of the scoop. So we'll try scraping and if we're, we might be able to scrape up some of that, but we're not going to count on that because the material is expected to be so cold and hard. So the bottom of the scoop actually has a little slot, and we put that bottom of the scoop down on the ice table, and there's a little rasp, a little drill that begins horizontally.

It's about the size of your pinky, and then rotates quickly and goes from horizontal toward the vertical, and it's designed to chip away very quickly at the icy soil, and within about a minute or so, it kicks a fair amount of material into the inside of the scoop, into the chamber. So we expect to do that two or three times to get enough material in the scoop to deliver to the instruments on the lander. That's Phoenix Landing Site Working Group Chair Ray Arvidson. At the close of last week's media briefing, Principal Investigator Peter Smith

was asked to describe his dream of not just a really good day on Mars, but the best of all possible days. Oh, my best day on Mars? Let's see. Well, finding the ice table. I think interacting with water on Mars has to be exciting. It's never been done. Getting a scoop full of kind of icy soil is going to be one of the peak experiences. And then having the opportunity of analyzing that and trying to understand what kind of environment this is and what it means for Mars science.

I think that's really going to be the best day for me. The other thing I might mention here is as we go through the layers of soil, our voyage is not horizontal, it's vertical, and the upper layer of soil is distributed planet-wide by global dust storms. So we start by sampling the upper layer of the entire planet. Those global dust storms that we see on Mars really have done a good job of allowing us to make the same kind of assessment where we land that the rovers are making where they are.

And then as we go down through the layers to the ice, we expect a transition because of that closeness of water, the interaction through the atmosphere. And so to me, it's the water cycle, and getting down to that ice layer would be the most exciting. We'll end this week's special coverage of the Phoenix mission with this excerpt from a video shown last December at the Arizona

Governor's Celebration of Innovation Gala. Here again is Peter Smith. We're landing inside the Arctic Circle on Mars and we're going to explore a part of Mars which represents 25 percent of the surface that's never been seen before by a lander. It's really a stepping stone on searching for life outside the Earth. The Phoenix mission is the first mission led by a university and our trip to Mars will be really the first time we've had a chance to operate a spacecraft on Mars from inside a university building. This is really exciting to us. Innovation, well the novation of course means new, so it's doing something new that's not been done. In our case, we're writing chapters of the Mars book that have never been even thought about yet. And our experiments are really state of the art, not been done before.

This is a time when we're preparing to land and to do something truly new and different on a different planet. We're going to look at the ice on Mars. Phoenix lander Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. By the time you hear our next show, we'll all know if his spacecraft has made it safely down to the Martian Arctic Circle. We'll continue next week with special coverage of the Planetary Society's PlanetFest event, celebrating new visions of Mars

as a flaming phoenix enters the atmosphere of the red planet. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts for his early celebration of Phoenix after we hear from Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, What should I study if I want to be a planetary scientist? Most space scientists have graduate degrees in astronomy, physics, or geology. Which one you should study depends upon what kind of research you want to do. Astronomers might use telescopes to search for new Kuiper belt objects or extrasolar planets, or to examine what known objects are made of by studying their spectra. Physicists might examine the inner workings of the sun

or explore the dynamics of the magnetic field or plasma environment of Jupiter. Geologists might map mountains on Venus, study why Iapetus is dark on one side and light on the other, or figure out what minerals asteroids are made of. To be any of these, you should probably major in the same science in college, and it's definitely helpful to do some significant coursework in math. Regardless of which science you choose to study, though, don't feel that you have to completely fill your course schedule with science and math classes. It's also very important for professional scientists to be able to

communicate well. They write technical papers and grant proposals and share their results in posters or talks at scientific conferences. Studying something other than your field of research also helps make you a more interesting person to talk to, and you shouldn't underrate the value of not being boring. So make sure you leave some room in your course schedule for humanities courses like literature, writing, history, or art

that will help you learn to communicate well in writing, speech, and images. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. 99 degrees in Pasadena, California. It's hot here, and it's going to get hotter because something's going to land where it's really cold. I think we're going to talk about that today. It's time for What's Up with Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. And he's going to tell us about the night sky and a certain phoenix.

How hot is it? It's really hot. It's really warm. Phoenix, the fiery bird. Yeah, rising from its own ashes. Yes, well, apparently it burst into flames today in the Pasadena area. But will be cooling itself on May 25th. Yes, that's right.

Phoenix landing on Mars May 25th. Yes, that's right. Phoenix landing on Mars, May 25th. Landing time, the Earth received time for landing, scheduled at 4.53 p.m. Pacific time. And hopefully that's when we'll hear happy little chirpy signals and then hopefully get some images an hour or two later. And hopefully you will be standing on stage at PlanetFest at the Pasadena Hilton, which is now sold out. PlanetFest sold out. PlanetFest, one night only. Sold out! Yeah, we'd love to add an extra night, but it only lands once. So, yes, we're sold out. I will be on stage.

You'll be there. It will be quite the festivity with everyone from the head of space science and JPL director to Bill Nye, Ray Bradbury, on and on and on. But let me not taunt you further if you do not have tickets. Lots of our favorite folks. Yeah, we'll tell you all about it on this radio show, though. It's true. Hopefully Matt will capture some of the wonderful moments, including hopefully a successful landing. The night sky. The night sky. In the meantime, hey, you can check out Mars and see where Phoenix is landing. It's the reddish thing in the evening sky in the west relative to Saturn. This is what I'm excited about is Mars and Saturn coming together in the sky in July, growing closer together. Mars still hanging out near the twins, Castor and Pollux closer to Pollux

and kind of similar in color, kind of that yellowish reddish off to the twins, Castor and Pollux, closer to Pollux, and kind of similar in color, kind of that yellowish-reddish. Off to the side, slightly brighter one. We've also got Saturn in the evening sky, of course, heading towards Mars in the sky. And you can see that high in the sky in the early evening, and it is very close to and makes a lovely little picture with Regulus, the brightest star in Leo. It is the somewhat brighter one, a little bit yellowish. Now, around midnight, up comes the giant king of the planets, Jupiter, brightest star-like object up from midnight until dawn. Easy to see around midnight in the east, and then dawn it'll be high overhead.

Hey, I guess I should mention, you might get a shot at Mercury. If you're listening to this still, it's starting to get lower and dimmer, but Mercury in the west shortly after sunset. Had a spectacular night. I happened to be up in Lake Arrowhead locally here in Southern California. Had a very clear night. Had the telescope out. Got to see a lot of this stuff, and it's all true.

You don't make this stuff up. I sure try not to. I make up other things, but usually not the night sky information what else you got we got this week in space history 35 years ago this week 1973 if i did my math right sky lab the first crew uh under the direction of pete conrad gets aboard sky lab for about a month or so a real space station real live space station for a brief few years in time. So that was 35 years ago. Let us go on, shall we? To Random Space Fact.

A resonant one there. That was very nice. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Hey, let's talk more about Phoenix because we can't get enough with the landing coming up. And specifically about something kind of spiffy on Phoenix. Although first I'll mention a little random space fact phoenix is of course run out of tucson because uh the university of arizona and tucson runs the phoenix spacecraft i don't know being

being easily entertained i always found that amusing but moving right along there is a mini dvd made of silica glass provided by the planetary society on the deck of of Phoenix. It contains a quarter million names of Planetary Society members and others who signed up to send their name to Mars, but it also contains visions of Mars, which includes authors like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, but also historical writings of people like Schiaparelli and War of the Worlds radio shows and art. Basically, the first library on Mars.

The Martians are really going to love it. If you want to know more, you can go to planetary.org and check out our Messages from Earth section. You can learn more about Phoenix TV, what we've got on there. Also, I'll mention we also have a link there if you want to send your name somewhere. We will get you off to the moon on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, working with NASA and APL on that. So let's go on to our trivia contest.

And in our trivia contest, I asked you about the SNIC meteorites, SNCs, the Martian meteorites named after. Places where they were originally found. I gave you the cities, asked you what were the countries that these first three SNIC meteorites were found in. How did we do, Matt? The cities ask you what were the countries that these first three SNCC meteorites were found in. How did we do, Matt? I'm going to let you go through them because I obviously much prefer that you mangle the pronunciations if anybody does. Oh, I'd love to.

But I will tell you the winner, and it's another repeat customer. Sven Weber. Sven from Germany. Heidelberg in Germany came up with. He just provided the countries, which is all we asked for. Egypt, France, and India, but do tell more. Well, Shurgati, India, in 1865, the first of the Martian meteorites was found. Of course, it was not known to be a Martian meteorite for another 100 years or so.

And then Nakla, Egypt, 1911, and the sea. And I'm sorry, I don't know French. You're supposed to know something about French. You want me to try it? Please. I'll go with Chassigny. Chassigny. Chassigny.

Chassigny. Chassigny. Chassigny, France. My daughter, who completed the French major, is holding her ears right now. Say, mon père, mon pauvre père. Anyway, there in France, 1815. I'm sorry, so even farther back in time. The actual first one found there in France.

But again, it wasn't until they analyzed gases inside some bubbles in some of these that they found, hey, after Viking, that matches exactly what Viking was sniffing around at. And these guys must be from Mars. And John Leese pointed out that it's one of the Nacla meteorites in that class that apparently hit a dog. Mars attacks.

I'm sure the dog's fine. What do you got for us next week? All right. For next week, I return you to the Phoenix DVD. On that DVD, we have a label. week, I return you to the Phoenix DVD. On that DVD, we have a label. On that label, we say,

Attention, astronauts! What do we tell the astronauts on the label? Oh, okay. Andy, it was polite, by the way. Uh-huh. What do we tell the astronauts on the label of the Phoenix DVD about to land on Mars? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter.

You have until the day after the landing of Phoenix on Mars in go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter. You have until the day after the landing of Phoenix on Mars in the Arctic, within the Arctic Circle of Mars. That's the 26th of May at 2 p.m. Pacific time. We've got to get out of here. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about perfect spheres.

Thank you, and good night. A perfect sphere. It's like Bugs Bunny when he was with Christopher Columbus explaining to King Ferdinand, the Earth is a sphere like a you had. And then the king hits him in the frying pan and says, yeah, the Earth is a flat like a you had. He's Bruce Betts. He's Matt Kaplan. He loves high brow humor. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Next time, the Phoenix landing on Mars and the Planet Fest celebration. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Have a great week. Thank you.