Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Drill Baby Drill! On Mars

Episode Date: March 11, 2013

With the first use of its drill and delivery of samples to its internal instruments, Curiosity is now a fully-functioning science station on Mars. JPL Sampling System Scientist Luther Beegle provides an update.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Drill, baby, drill, but on Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, is now a fully functioning science station. We can say that because the last of MSL's amazing set of tools has now been put to use. We'll talk about the complex sampling system, including the first real drill on Mars, with Luther Beagle of the Jet Propulsion Lab, which built and operates the big rover. Later we'll talk craters and dead astronomers with Bruce Betts,

and we'll give you another chance to win Bill Nye the Science Guy's voice on your answering system. In lead-off position is the Planetary Society senior editor and popular blogger Emily Lakdawalla. But even before that, this reminder that I'm probably in Chile's Atacama Desert as you hear this. You can follow my visit to ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array, in my Atacama Diary, where I'm chronicling this trip to the driest spot on Earth, 5,000 meters or 16,500 feet above sea level. Pictures and sound are there as well.

It's all in my blog at planetary.org. Emily, welcome back. This is an especially interesting topic, I think, that we have today. It's focused on a post that you got up on the blog on the 6th of March. The planetary science in this is fascinating, but it's actually, I think, secondary to the topic you really wanted to talk about. Yeah, that's right. As this conversation was unfolding over Twitter, it just made me grateful again for the new medium of Twitter for discussing all kinds of great ideas and having random people suddenly participate in an exciting discussion. What happened here is that I posted a link to a blog entry about this comet at Mars in which I'd wondered if the comet

might bring a meteor shower to Mars. And the answer to that is probably not, but we can only hope. But there's another scientist on Twitter who said, you know, I wondered if there was a chance that there could be meteor showers at Titan. And that ignited this conversation among several planetary scientists, as well as several bystanders. There is a graduate student in linguistics. There is a retired orbital mechanics guy. There's other random people who I don't even know what they are in real life, but they're all participating

in this fascinating overlapping conversation about whether there might be meteors and what they might look like and what titanium life might see if they're looking up in the sky to see these meteors. It was just a great conversation. And I posted it on the blog as an example of why Twitter is so much more than people posting photos of their breakfast. So your feelings about Twitter have certainly evolved. And this only makes me feel more guilty

that I don't follow it more closely. So maybe it will have a positive influence on me as well. But the entire thread is there. As I said, it's a March 6 entry in Emily's blog at planetary.org. And would you please just say something about the conclusion? If a meteor came down through the Titan atmosphere, would humans see it? The answer is likely not because Titan's atmosphere is so thick and also because the orbital velocity of things out at that distance from the sun is so slow that anything would actually burn up toward the top of the atmosphere. So ironically, they'd be more visible from above than they would be from below. Ah, but a Titanian whose eyes would have probably evolved to see infrared. Oh, we'll leave it at that. Emily, thanks so much.

Thank you, Matt. It's all in the blog. She is a senior editor for the Planetary Society and our Twittering planetary evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. That's Emily Lakdawalla. Bill Nye is away this week, still on the road, so we're going to jump directly to a conversation

that has come up with Emily as well, with Luther Beagle, one of the scientists who works with Curiosity's ability to drill into rocks and collect samples, as it has just done for the first time. We were all thrilled beyond measure when Curiosity touched down on Mars. We marveled at its first images of the red planet's surface. We oohed and aahed when it started zapping rocks with its ChemCam laser. So what's the big deal when it starts to drill into rocks? Only that this is yet another first for Mars exploration, that it means the first Martian soil has been delivered to the most sophisticated analysis instruments ever to reach that planet, and that we will soon begin to learn if the ancient surface was capable of sustaining life. That's all. Luther Beagle has waited years for this moment.

He's a research scientist and group supervisor at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California, and he's also a sampling system scientist for Curiosity, tasked with making sure this intricate collection system does what it came for without damaging the rover. Luther dropped by the Planetary Society HQ a few days ago to tell us how things are going. Luther, thanks very much for stopping by the Planetary Society HQ a few days ago to tell us how things are going. Luther, thanks very much for stopping by the Planetary Society for this little update on Curiosity. Thanks, it's good to be here. You know, we're here primarily to talk about what I believe may be the greatest physical accomplishment by Curiosity

since those seven minutes of terror that got it down onto the surface. But before we do that, what is the current status of the rover? I mean, I think almost all of our audience knows that there was a scary moment or two a little while ago. There was. One of the computer systems, we have two computer systems. It's dual string. They're fully redundant. The first one we were using, the RCEA, had a little bit of an issue. We quickly identified it, members of the team, and we've started using the RCEB. And we're going through testing to get everything up and running. And then once that's accomplished, we're going to try to turn RCEA back on to find out what happened.

We're speaking on March 5th. So by the time people hear this, probably much more will be known. And we'll try and report that. Or people should watch for Emily Lakdawalla's blog, where she is following this, of course. Any idea yet what may have happened? Is this one of those wonderful random cosmic ray hits? I do not know. I've been in the Mojave for four days. So I've been kind of outside the loop, but the team seems to have gotten at least a hold of what the issue is. And as soon as we turn RCEA back on, we'll find out. All right. Well, thank goodness for redundancy.

Yeah. It's a good thing. So congratulations to you and the entire team. You've drilled into a rock for the first time anywhere in the solar system. Well, we've drilled into things before, just not on Mars. The Soviets drilled into Venus. They got about three centimeters or so into Venus. I didn't. One of the Venera landers, I guess. I didn't know that. They actually did some XRD with it. What's XRD?

Oh, sorry. X-ray diffractometry. It's to identify the mineralogy. They did that backRD with it. And what's XRD? Oh, sorry, X-ray diffractometry. It's to identify the mineralogy. They did that back in the 70s. It was a stationary lander that came down and operated for, I think it was an hour, got a sample, and that's what it did. We've done a little bit of this on the moon, too, both the Russians and the United States back when we were racing around on the moon. So we've done some drilling on the moon. This is the first time we've done it on Mars on a robotic platform. You know, I did forget that the Apollo astronauts did a little bit of this as well.

Just the same, first time on Mars, and quite different from what we've seen in the past, which was scraping or abrading. I mean, you really got to dig in. How far down does this drill go? The drill itself gets into about six and a half centimeters. We actually collect samples from about three to five centimeters. So the way the drill works is we pound the rocks. It's a rotary percussive drill, like a Bosch drill you can get at Home Depot. It does both hammering and rotation.

We create fines with that, and the fines get sucked up the middle of the drill. The majority of them come in from about the three to five centimeter range. I hope that people will take a look at the website. We'll put links up at planetary.org slash radio, and then the page where this show is located. They really have to see the gyrations, the dance, the cosmic dance that this arm goes through, not just in the drilling process, but everything that follows, including doing this little shake, rattle, and roll to knock off excess? So what we've been doing for the first drill sample is we're using it to clean.

We did the same thing at Rocknest when we did the scooping. We're trying to get rid of all the terrestrial contamination. And so at Rocknest, when we scooped up soil samples, the first three times we did this, we just dumped the soil samples overboard, used it to clean up any residual organics that were left there because of the assembly process in Florida. We're doing the same thing with a drill. So a lot of what you see on the website, I think, is extra movements that are required to get sample everywhere inside the drill bit assembly or DBA. Once we are sure we're clean, then we clean up that a little bit. It doesn't do as much of that, but it still does a lot because

the sample movement chain is quite complex on how we have to move the sample around from the drill into the final destination inside the instruments. People need to see the CAD model to see the path that these samples go through once they've been picked up by the drill. What is actually moving these soil or regular samples through all those little tubes to get them where they need to go? Martian gravity and well-placed arm movements to move everything the way you want it to move. One of the reasons why we do all of this is that one of the instruments, the Kemen XRD instrument, X-ray diffractometer, it requires samples to be less than 150 microns. So we have a sieve inside the arm and we have to move that material around. We like to look at the material before it

goes through the sieve to find out how much material we actually drilled. We don't have a scale on board. Then we put it through the sieve, and we like to look at it again, and then we dump it to either Kemen or the SAM, the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer instrument. So this sieve, which we should talk a little bit more about, not that different from when I took my daughters to the beach and they had their little screen device and they'd shake it and all the fine pieces of sand would come out of the bottom. But this sieve, based on some tests done back here at home, I guess you're having to be careful with this now. Well, there's two sieves, actually. There's a one millimeter sieve specifically for the SAM instrument, and there's the 150 micron sieve, which is both for the SAM and the GC instrument. And, you know, during testing, we've tested all of this material.

We've tested under Martian ambient conditions. It looked like there was a small issue with the sieve may have been coming out. And to be conservative, because this instrument does have to work for some time, we've reduced the amount of hitting and vibing we've tried to do on the sieve to make sure it lasts longer. We're pretty confident, actually we're very confident, that nothing like what we saw in the test beds will happen on Mars, but we're just trying to make sure that that's the case. We'll be back with Luther Beagle and more about Curiosity's drill and the rest of its sampling system in a minute. This is Planetary

Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds! And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

My guest this week is Luther Beagle, one of the thousands of scientists, engineers, and others who are part of the Curiosity mission on Mars. who are part of the Curiosity mission on Mars. Luther's role for the last four years has been sampling system scientist, and it's just in the last month that he has finally seen this complex but elegant system begin to collect the soil of Mars. Even better, it is using its drill to extract samples that have not been exposed to the harsh Martian environment for perhaps billions of years. Luther was telling us before the break about concern for one of the sieves that allows only the right size sample particles to reach the internal science instruments.

One of the earthbound test beds has suffered a few broken edge welds, welds that hold the vital sieve in place. And even in the test bed model where I guess these welds, some of the welds separated, you still were able to, the sieve was still doing its job. The sieve was still doing its job, yes. And I bet you guys have just studied, I bet these welds have been studied more than any weld in the history of the space program. Maybe not, but it's up there.

We've studied the whole system, and this is one of the things that we learned from just testing. And we've tested a lot of rocks. We've drilled a lot of rocks. We've drilled a lot of different types of rocks. We've drilled under Martian ambient conditions. We've drilled under Martian pressure and temperature. We've drilled in regular laboratory conditions. We've just tested everything.

So when something like this comes up, it's not a surprise. A couple of weeks ago, Emily Locke DiWalla on my colleague here, of course, with the blog. We were just going crazy talking about this gorgeous image of this little scoop full of dirt that I guess was part of the proof that things had gone the way they were supposed to. Awfully pretty picture. It's just amazing. We use that scoop to identify how much material we actually collected from the drill. But when you look at it and you can see the different colors from the material that we have now versus what we saw at Rocknest, it's just a spectacular image. All of the cameras on board the spacecraft are just great. I could look at

those pictures all day long. I want to come back to the color of that sample in a moment, but was this really as momentous an accomplishment as I described it up front? I think so, but that's because I've been working on it for four years off and on. Yeah, it was really nice. And just to watch it work on another planet is just, it's mind-blowing at the very least. It works so well. It just, everything worked the way it should work. The whole process of picking the sample and trying to identify what it was before we put it into the sieve and drill just worked. Everything worked like a charm. And seeing those pictures, we actually, I saw them at JPL at like 11 o'clock at night.

It was just unbelievable. It was just so great to see. It just makes all the work worthwhile when you see something like that. So where are we now? Where has that sample material gone? For right now, we've delivered sample to both Sam and Kemin. And they have done a preliminary analysis, which I think is going to be the result of a press conference next week or this week, depending on when you're listening to this. And when the computer malfunctioned, we were about to deliver more sample. So one of the things we like to do is there's a lot of knobs and turns and twists you can do with these instruments because they're very,

very well put together. We want to look at different aspects of the sample. So we're going to deliver more sample to both Kemen and Sam as soon as the computer is up and running again. So that beautiful gray, at least in the picture to me, looked almost greenish gray dust. Quite different, as you've already implied, from the surface color. And that must be making the soil scientists very excited. Everybody was excited when they saw what that material looked like and realized that, wow, we're at a place that this material has not been on the surface for billions of years.

It's great. It's not oxidized. It's not rusted out like the surface material. It looks pristine, and we're just really excited to get the analysis of what it is down. So what is ahead, not just in the next week or two, but over the, let's hope, even more than two-year mission of this rover? Yeah. So right now, once the computers come back on, like I said, we'll deliver a sample to both Sam and Kemen again, get the confirmation analysis of that. There's a talk of drilling another hole inside the Yellowknife Bay where we are now. The science team is weighing the pros of cons for this. We have conjunction coming up in April, which means that Mars is on the other side of the sun, and the team gets to stand down for a little bit and catch our breath,

which will be really nice, and work on the scientific papers that we've all been wanting to write. After that, then we're going to head off to Mount Sharp, and that's going to be a long trek, but it'll be well worth it once we get there. We may stop and do some science along the way, depending on what we see, but the ultimate destination of this rover is Mount Sharp,

and we'll get there hopefully soon and do some really great science there as well. Nice work, Luther. Congratulations once again to you, the team that has been dealing with this soil sampling system, including the drill, and, of course, to everybody else who is behind that amazing machine on Mars. It's amazing how many people have worked on this over the drill, and of course to everybody else who is behind that amazing machine on Mars. That's amazing how many people have worked on this over the years. And there's just, you can't thank enough people. The people that make everybody like me look good, it's really nice. That's Luther Beagle. He is a research scientist and group supervisor at JPL. And for the purposes of this conversation, he is specifically one of the sampling system

scientists for Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, which is now a fully operational science station on the surface of the red planet. We'll be right back with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up in just a few moments. Bruce Betts is on the Skype line for this week's edition of What's Up. I don't even know how I'm able to talk to you, actually, since I'm in Chile as this is being heard. The magic of radio. Indeed, the magic, the time dilation of planetary radio. Yeah.

So tell me, what should I be looking for in the southern... Are you enjoying yourself? I'm having the best time of my life when I can breathe. Look for the Southern Cross. That's what we don't get to see, as well as many other things. Look for the galactic center. Ooh, yeah, that's right. Okay, man, too bad I can't bring my telescope.

Comet Pan-STARRS is running away from you because let's start with Comet Pan-STARRS C2011L4 moving from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere about the time you're moving from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere. Trying to avoid me, no doubt. Pretty much, although you still might be able to check it out after sunset. There's a really impressive picture I just saw taken from the Atacama showing two comets, that and Comet Lemon, both in the sky at the same time. Oh, cool. So look for that in the southern hemisphere. In the northern hemisphere, we're finally getting our shot at Comet Pan-STARRS-C 2011 L4. And on March 10th, pass within 45 million kilometers of the sun,

so closer than Mercury, coming around the horn. It is low in the west after sunset, so closer than Mercury. Coming around the horn, it is low in the west after sunset, so tricky. Because of that, you'll probably want to fire up binoculars, because whether you can see it naked eye or not, you'll do better seeing the fuzzy blob and possibly tail if you pull out binoculars. Look after sunset, but not too long after sunset in the west. It will keep getting higher over the course of March, but then pretty much not be visible, but at least for this couple weeks coming up. Time to look low in the west after sunset. Let me give you one other guide, which is on March 12th. It is just to the upper left of the crescent

moon, and on the 13th it is below the crescent moon brightest comet in quite a while probably first or second magnitude but still that's spread over a wide area so if you see it in the atacama it's probably stunning if i see it in los angeles it probably isn't i'll let you know also check out jupiter as always in in recent months, hanging out now in the south in the early evening, super bright object. We've got Saturn coming up later around 10 or 11 p.m. in the east, looking yellowish. And that's what's going on in the sky. Now, let's move on to this week in space history. And speaking of long-dead astronomers, in 1781 william herschel discovered uranus and as

you know wanted to name it after king george but then someone said that's not funny enough we need something that will cause uh adolescent jokes for the next several centuries yeah and and astronomy 101 students to get a laugh. If at least in English. Okay, we move on to... Did we get the all clear? Everything okay out there? You got the all clear now.

I'm diving for the shelter. So, Matt, are you taking your raincoat to the Atacama? I don't know. Do I need it? Well, that's a good idea, but you don't often need a raincoat in the Atacama, which hosts many an observatory in one of the driest places on Earth. The ALMA site you are at averages about 100 millimeters or about 3.9 inches of rain annually. So you could get it, but you'd have to be unlucky. That's actually more than I expected in the driest place on Earth. I don't know the details of that. But yeah, it's got several things that contribute to being dry,

which is, of course, one of the reasons that being really high up and why they love it for things like submillimeter observatories. But you have rain shadows created by the Andes and the Chilean coastal range, the inversion from the Humboldt current off the coast of Chile, and, of course, dry air descending between the Hadley cell and the Farrell cell, which is forming the South Pacific high. I will watch for all of those. Please do. Okay, we move on, but we'll come back, because I'm excited about you hanging out and chilling. Thank you. But in the meantime, I asked you,

on what two planetary bodies does the Polish astronomer Copernicus, born in 1473, have craters named after him. How'd we do, Matt? We got such fun answers. I wish I could share more of them, but I'll have a couple to tell you about after we talk about some of the straight answers here, including our winner chosen by Random.org. It was Steve Lehman, longtime listener and enterer, but I believe a first-time winner in Charlottesville, Virginia,

where I happen to know he is the leader or the director of the municipal band and a member of the Astronomical Society in that town where the University of Virginia is based, my father's alma mater. Go Cavaliers. Steve said the moon and Mars are where those craters are. They are indeed. You don't have too many people that have craters on two bodies named after them. Not bad.

And some other people pointed out, a couple of folks, that he also has an asteroid, asteroid 1322 Copernicus, discovered in 1934. One of those people who told us was David Kaplan. Steve, we're going to send you another revenge T-shirt, that terrific T-shirt from Saturday morning breakfast cereal, SMBC, with the dinosaur wreaking his revenge, revenge for all of his kind on the asteroids. And it's a terrific shirt. And we thank SMBC for providing that to us.

They have all kinds of terrific stuff on their website. Can I give you some of the other stuff here? There's some other really fun stuff. Oh, please do. This one is just interesting. Ilya Schwartz, who we get good stuff from all the time, said that Copernicus on the moon, of course, not Mars, was a possible landing site for an Apollo mission, the canceled Apollo 20 mission, if only it had happened. We had at least two people who wanted to point out that there was actually

there were third Copernicus craters, maybe third and fourth. Randy Bottoms said, there was a third crater, but it is no longer in existence. You see, Copernicus had an innie. Now, for those who aren't up on that, what may be a purely American idiom, it's his belly button.

But I love this one as well from David Springer. He says, coincidentally, my dog, Luna, also has an 800 million year old crater on her earth facing side. Just struck me as fun. I enjoy dogs named Luna. I know. So what do you got for next time? You're in Chile at this really high observatory, ALMA, they're

dedicating, but you know, it's not the highest permanent observatory in the world. It is not? It is not. It is near it, but you know, it's not the highest permanent observatory in the world. It is not? It is not. It is near it, but it is a distinct separate observatory. What is the highest permanent astronomical observatory and how high is it? Permanent, you know, being a loose term as opposed to someone hauling a telescope up Mount Everest and claiming to be an observatory.

Wait a minute. I think I see it over there on the ridge. Look up, my friend. All right. Well, how do they enter? Go to Sunday. You know, 10 years of saying the same thing over and over again makes it hard. How about go to planetary.org slash radio contest?

Nailed it. Yes! And you have until the 18th. That'd be Monday, March 18 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. All right. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up at the night sky and think about cans of dry air as dry as Atacama and how weird that is.

Wait a minute. I got mine here too there it is he's bruce betts he blows us away every week here with what's up by the way the contest prize will once again be Bill Nye's voice on our winner's answering system. One more reminder that you can follow my trip to the dedication of Alma in my Autocomma diary, part of my blog at planetary.org. You'll find it with the other great blogs offered by the Planetary Society, including Emily's. Of course, I'll also present highlights of my South American adventure here on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Society in Pasadena, California. Thank you.