Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Field Test: Planetary Deep Drill

Episode Date: December 15, 2015

Drilling through many meters of ice to Europa’s ocean or to the pristine sub-surface layers of Mars will be hard. The Planetary Deep Drill prototype has shown that it may be a practical approach. Join Mat Kaplan and Planetary Society colleagues at the field test site deep in California’s desert.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How we may someday drill deep 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. Join us in the California desert for the real-world test of planetary deep drill, an innovative prototype that may someday allow humans to dig far below the surface of the red planet Europa Enceladus or another icy body in our solar neighborhood. I've also got a special holiday treat for you toward the end of this week's show. Bill Nye has the week off as he continues his unstoppable book tour, but senior editor Emily Lachdwala is here with hot news and hot images. Emily, I'm hoping we can start with a description from you about the present,

the Christmas and holiday present that the European Space Agency has given all of us. That's a present they've been saving up since last year, actually. It's the first release of images of the comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko, taken by the OSIRIS camera, which is the science camera on Rosetta. They had released some images before, but all of them were taken before they actually arrived at the comet. So it was just a smudge in the middle of the view. I haven't had a chance to dig into the data set yet, but I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be gorgeous. Now, you do have this blog entry that has at least one already very gorgeous image.

Yes, they've decided to start releasing a single image per day most days. This is actually new data. These are images that were taken within the last couple of days. So that's a one image per day release that we can also look forward to. So that's a bonus. Let's jump over to Japan, or rather Venus, where we're learning more about Akatsuki getting down to work. That's right. It was such an amazing accomplishment. Akatsuki safely got into orbit. They had a press briefing last week where they announced the new orbit. It's actually a little bit smaller than they anticipated, which means that the engines overperformed, so that's very good. And they're going to spend about three months in a shakedown of the spacecraft,

getting all the instruments working and making sure that they're ready to start doing science for a two-year nominal mission. So they're still getting underway, but you've already got a few images from the cameras. kind of interesting because they were taken at a distance that would have been the spacecraft's maximum distance from Venus if it had entered orbit as originally planned back in 2010. But when the main engine blew up and they had to go back around the sun five times before heading back into Venus orbit this time, they are successfully in orbit. But it's a much longer orbit than originally planned, which means they'll be getting much farther away from Venus than originally planned. And Venus will mostly look a lot smaller to the cameras. But periodically in each orbit, they'll get close enough to snap pictures of this quality. So another thing that

you write about, have been writing about, is the enormous outpouring of fan support for this mission in Japan. Tell us a little bit about that. They really needed public support in order to get through the long, dry five years of orbiting around the sun. And they engaged the public really well on Twitter and developed this huge following. And there's all kinds of wonderful stuff you can find on Twitter. There's fan art, there's fan videos and fan songs, and they're just really enjoyable to check out. And I think we're going to exit with a little fragment of one of those fan songs about this intrepid little explorer now at Venus.

Emily, as always, thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Go to the deep end Bruce, tell me where we are. We're at U.S. Gypsum Mine near the Salton Sea in southeastern California here for Planetary Deep Drill First Field Test, and it's exciting. Bruce Betts was just one of the Planetary Society colleagues who traveled with me to that U.S. gypsum facility that is more quarry than mine. After a long drive

south from Pasadena and with hard hats and bright safety vests in place, we were ready to follow Chris Zachney of Honeybee Robotics to the site where the field test of planetary deep drill was underway. We've heard from Chris before. He is Honeybee's vice president and director of exploration technology. We drove across the desolate quarry past gigantic dump trucks loaded with gypsum, the valuable sulfate mineral that may be in the walls of your home or office and is the main component of the chalk you wrote with in school. Drilling through gypsum is remarkably similar to the challenge a drill will face as it someday burrows through the frigid water ice below the surface of Mars or Europa.

Within minutes we were at the site. I joined Chris next to the scaffold-like tower from which the planetary deep drill was suspended by an umbilical. We spoke as a compressor and small generator droned a few meters away. So what you see above the surface is almost five meters worth of a tower. So imagine you have to go two of those towers below the surface before you even see the drill. It's the first time where we drilled to this kind of depth.

The previous record was around 10 meters. We're at 13.8 meters and we're still going strong. Probably we're going to finish around 20 meters sometime next week. We want to wrap it up before Christmas. Several organizations have a hand in the planetary deep drill project, beginning with one of the most prestigious museums in the United States. American Museum of Natural History provided majority of funding. We built the drill, so Honeybee, U.S. Gypsum provided the site, and obviously the Planetary Society has been fantastic supporting the field deployment and subsidizing essentially some of the instruments that we put in the drill itself.

This drill, also partially funded by NASA, after we're done, we're going to bring the drill back to the lab. And the next project is to convert the Sherlock, the Mars 2020 instruments, the Raman spectrometer, from a sort of box size or shape into what's going to be a long and slim tube. And this long, slim tube is going to be mounted on top of a drill. We're going to come back here, do a system level testing, and then go to Greenland and drill a couple of holes down to like something like 100 meters in 2017. This is our actually second hole. We started drilling beginning of November. The first hole is a few hundred feet away. We penetrated over 10 meters at the rate of one to two meters per day.

This is the first prototype of this kind of generation of a drill with embedded electronics. We can scale it down to maybe around 2.5 meters, which would be perfect for the Curiosity-sized rover. Demonstrating the technology that could fly to Mars. Mars polar regions, for example, where Phoenix landed touchdown and scratched the surface of ice, we can come back, and instead of scratching the millimeters of ice, we can go tens and hundreds of meters below the surface. The depth required to go down to that has not been oxidized and irradiated by a galactic cosmic rays. And the drill itself requires literally 200 to 250 watts of power to drill.

Well, on a curiosity, the RTG provides around 100 watts of power, continuous power. These 100 watts from RTG is recharging the batteries. So you can easily get these kind of 200 to 300 watts of power coming out of the batteries. these kind of 200, 300 watts of power coming out of the batteries. Your Home Depot drill requires 700 watts, and that's powered from these small batteries. So Curiosity in a power system can provide kilowatts. From a power standpoint, we're good. From a volume standpoint, we're good. The technology is robust enough.

We're demonstrating right now we can drill tens and hundreds of meters. So I think all the pieces come nicely together for a new mission to Mars in the next decade or two. Planetary Deep Drill takes a different approach from most of what has been attempted or proposed for getting deep beneath the surfaces of other worlds. Our principal investigator, Dr. Mike Shara from AMNH, he really wanted to bring an instrument to the sample instead of bringing a sample to the instrument. So he was changing the paradigm in space exploration.

If you look at Curiosity, Curiosity has a drill, and this drill captures the sample and brings the sample to the instrument. We have to do it all the way around. We have to bring an instrument to that sample itself. Microscope can do half a micron per pixel. We have four LEDs to illuminate the borehole, because as you can imagine, if you go a meter, two meters below the surface, it's pitch black, which is in a way nice, because you can choose whatever light you want to illuminate the borehole with.

So we have two white LEDs, and we have also two UV LEDs. And those two UV LEDs, they have actually two different wavelengths, and they look for fluorescence. Apart from that, we have pressure, temperature, relative humidity, the stuff that's really easy to put in. Are you pulling it all the way up? Yes, yes. What are we looking at? So as you saw, when the first time you saw the driller coming out, if you go from top to the bottom, first part is a microscope with a sort of pressure, temperature sensor, relative humidity. Just underneath, we have an anchoring system or shoes. The drill still requires some kind of stabilization. The Home Depot drill is stabilized by your hand or is

below the surface. To prevent the drill from rotating, we need some kind of an anchor. And this is provided by three shoes at 120 degrees, which are pressing against the side of the borehole and anchoring, literally anchoring the drill in place. They're sort of grippers. They expand and hold against the side of the shaft? Pretty much. It's sort of what climbers do, climbing up a mountain, they're pressing against inside a crevasse, and that's how they can climb up. And the drill does exactly the same thing. I asked Chris Zachney how they ended up here in the isolated southeastern corner of California,

just a few tens of kilometers from the border with Mexico. One of the scientists pointed out that close to the Salton Sea used to be Gulf of California. So you had all these evaporating deposits. So this was all underwater once upon a time. This used to be underwater. That's right. So this gypsum that we're standing on used to be underwater and was formed tens of millions of years ago. When water retreated, we have these gypsum deposits so he thought well you know this this has some geological potential and we just recently found that for astrobiology is also pretty good it's three hours away from from pasadena if you drive fast uh what uh tip the the scale

was a management of us gypsum gypsum. They were absolutely phenomenal. When we approached them, they got super excited. They helped us select the site. The U.S. gypsum chief geologist provided all the background we needed to the location. So they were absolutely fantastic. So hats off, or hard hats off, to U.S. gypsum. Inside a rented truck were dusty tables loaded with the control systems for the drill, along with the monitoring equipment for the instruments it was carrying far below our feet.

I looked over the shoulder of another honeybee engineer as he watched the live image from the microscope Chris mentioned. At that moment, the scene was illuminated by the ultraviolet LEDs mounted in the side of the drill. It's revealing things that you wouldn't see in white light? Yeah, we're hoping that maybe some microorganisms would emit some fluorescence. And you actually can see just a speck there. So who knows, maybe that is a microorganism. A little spot saying hello to us. That's right. We might have found life on Earth. I'd say it's a mission success. I think so too. Outside the truck

were two very interested observers from the Jet Propulsion Lab. Mike Malaska is the science principal investigator and Bill Abbey is a co-PI for a project called Watson. Why Watson? Here's Bill Abbey. Our goal here is to actually put an instrument, a spectrometer on here that's very similar to an instrument called Sherlock, which is being built for the next generation Mars mission in 2020. The 2020 rover. The 2020 rover, yes, that's correct.

Mike, is this a practical technology? Could you see this going to Mars and sending us back good science? Absolutely. So we could see this not only from Mars, but we could also look at places like Enceladus or Europa, anywhere where you have a very large expanse of ice, and you want to know about the chemistry and possibly even the biology or at least the microenvironment that exists in the ice underneath the different layers that would show possibly depositional record of the weather pattern and climate cycles on Mars, or for Enceladus, you know, the plume eruptions and deposition onto the surface of that world.

Titan? Titan might be a little bit different. Titan is sort of the weird cousin of all of the ocean worlds. So it does have a fairly thick layer of organics on the top surface. So the properties of that and the ability to drill, we don't quite know yet. That might be a bit of a stretch. How does this compare to other planetary drill technologies that you've seen, if you've seen some. So most of the previous efforts have been looking at melt probes. So you're actually just melting the ice and then kind of dropping down into the water.

One of the problems that you're going to have for places such as Europa is that the surface is very cold. It's about 100 Kelvin. And the thermal conductivity of ice is very, very, very high. So a melt probe might not actually work. Some of the preliminary calculations suggest it will be very difficult. So a physical drill such as this might actually be a better option. You're headed to Greenland with this? Yeah, so for spring in 2017, we're hoping to be on the, doing sort of like an engineering run to see how the drill handles in a very large amount of ice,

and that would be on the west coast of Greenland. And then we're hoping very soon after then go into near the summit station in the center of Greenland and then sending this thing down through a very large amount of fern ice and actually seeing if we can attain glacial ice as well. You can read much more about the planetary deep drill field test in Bruce Bett's blog at planetary.org. You'll also see some of the great picks Bruce took during our visit. I found Chris Zachney again as we prepared to make the long drive north back to Pasadena. My feel is that once we implement top-level automation, we're going to do several meters per day very easy with a push of a button.

Wow. Meeting, exceeding your expectations? Absolutely, absolutely. Previous record was around 10 meters for planetary drill here on Earth. We broke it twice. We actually keep on breaking our own records right now. Pleasantly surprised we didn't have any problems with the drill. It's solid. Nothing broke.

And most of the time when we go out, the reason to go out is to try to break the drill. And this drill, you know, we drilled two holes, almost 25 meters combined footage, and it didn't break. It's a good design. Chris, it's very nice to be out here in the desert with you. Likewise, Matt. It's quiet now at the drill site. The compressor and the generator are off, and it looks like the end of another day of operations for Planetary Deep Drill

and the end of our coverage of it, at least for this time around, on Planetary Radio. Stay tuned. What's Up is up next with Bruce Betts. Hi, I'm Andy Weir, author of The Martian. Do you know how my character, Mark Watney, will make it to Mars someday? He'll get there because people like you and me and organizations like the Planetary Society never stop fighting to advance space exploration and science. The challenges have rarely been greater than they are right now. You can learn what the Society is doing and how you can help at Planetary.org.

Mark and I will thank you for taking steps to ensure humanity's bright future across the solar system and beyond. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Mark Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching.

That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Mark. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Mark?

Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We are not in the studio. We are not on Skype. Bruce, where are we? We are on Earth, Matt. We are near the Salton Sea in Southern California, standing on top of sand next to a barkhand sand dune. I'm disappointed to hear we're on Earth, but it is an awesome sight. It is really quite beautiful. From here, we're going to talk about what's up. And I should say we're out here because we were covering the planetary deep drill test at a quarry nearby. And we saw some beautiful night skies with our colleagues,

Merck and Andrew last night. Tell us, what did we see and what might other people see tonight? We saw stars in the Milky Way, which is a lot of stars. People can see that tonight, but they also can go out in the pre-dawn, which we were too lazy to do, or at least I was, and check out some lovely planets. We've still got super bright Venus and above that dimmer Mars and above that bright Jupiter. Also, if you're picking this up right after it comes out, you might pick up some additional Geminid meteors from the Geminid meteor shower that peaked on the 13th and 14th. It's good stuff. It's pretty skies we found out in dark land here.

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. We didn't have to go far from our hotel either. No, we were just led by Andrew into the dark, murky woods, and you too. I'm not sure what he had in mind. Anyway, we move on to this week in space history. It was this week in 1972 that the last humans ever walked on the moon in Apollo 17. And it looked a little bit like this. Kind of, sort of, but not really. No sand dunes, no water in the distance, no plants. But other than that, it was nearly identical. Yeah, see?

You got it. You're right. You're right. All right, now we need to do a barking sand dune version. Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom You got a little sand in your throat? I did. I think I've damaged myself. So, bark and sand dunes, which are fortune cookie kind of loner sand dunes, occur also on Mars. And the sand dunes we're hanging out next to were studied before planetary exploration got underway by Bob Sharp and colleagues. Bob Sharp, former Caltech geology professor, for whom Mount Sharp is named after that Curiosity is now exploring. There are also a number of different types of sand dunes on Mars, just like there are on Earth. One of your profs, right?

One of my profs, yep, did geology field trips. He was the expert of field geology. did geology field trips. He was the expert of field geology. And a program note, watch the website and elsewhere because there's going to be a random space fact right in this spot where we're standing now with cool video. Random space fact video. And I'm guessing we'll post some pictures to social media and elsewhere of us standing in front of this magnificent site.

I wouldn't be surprised. Okay, remember the trivia question that we asked two weeks ago? Yes, I asked you what was the seventh moon discovered? Because we had, of course, the Earth's moon and the four big Galilean satellites of Jupiter and big Titan around Saturn. But what was next? How'd we do, Matt? This lit up the skies, just like those moons. We get a lot of responses. Our winner, I believe, first-time winner, Heather Murray of Nixa, Missouri. Iapetus, discovered by Cassini. That is indeed correct, by the man Cassini, not the spacecraft Cassini. As was pointed out by a number of listeners, Heather, you're our big winner this week, and you are going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a set of 2016 Year in Space calendars,

both the desk and wall calendars. You and I are contributors to the desk calendar version of that. And they are magnificent. Heather added, the theme of most of the geological features on this moon come from the French poem, The Song of Roland, which is pretty neat, since Cassini became quite the Francophile later on in life. Wow, cultural history. We also got this from Ilya Schwartz in Columbia, Maryland. Iapetus is also the third largest natural satellite of Saturn, 11th largest in the solar system, and, and I hope I don't throw you here, I bet I won't, the largest body in the solar system known not to be in hydrostatic equilibrium,

which means, what, what? The effect that we see from that is being spherical. Oh, I see. So it's like oblongers. It's more complicated, but I assume that's what they're referring to, although I'll have to look into that in more detail. Brian Castro, beautifully mapped by another more robotic Cassini in a flyby on September 10, 2007, a mere 355 years, 10 months, and 16 days after the original Cassini discovered it.

Really? I thought it was much shorter than that. Nine days. Yeah, that's probably right. Finally, I thought it was much shorter than that. Nine days. Yeah, that's probably right. Finally, Mark Schindler in Honolulu. This moon, as we all know, has a black monolith located in the center of its lighter-colored hemisphere. This is the black-and-white cookie moon, as people know, and the walnut moon as well.

An interplanetary conspiracy has erased it in all known pictures of Iapetus and even went so far as to move its location to Jupiter orbit in the movie 2001. So thank you, Mark. Okay. That's in the original book, 2001, Arthur C. Clarke. Never mind. Go on.

What's for next time? All right. Back on the topic of sand dunes. Tell us the four worlds in our solar system on which sand dunes have been discovered. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and get us your entry. You have until the 22nd. That'll be Tuesday, December 22nd at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer this time. And if you do and you're chosen by random.org, you're going to get another lovely Planetary Radio t-shirt

and a set of Year in Space desk and wall calendars. You can learn more about those at yearinspace.com. We're done. All right, maybe we can include some sand while we're at it. I'm going to bring some home in my shoes. Speaking of which, everyone go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about, you guessed it, sand in your shoes, because I know I am right now.

It gets into everything. You know what I mean? He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here in front of a sand dune for What's Up. Time for that special treat I mentioned. Not long ago, I produced a story in honor of the 100th anniversary of general relativity. I finally got a few extra minutes to include it here on Planetary Radio. Though it was created for KCRW's 2015 radio race, you are among the first to hear it. I hope you enjoy my little

gift. Time is the essence of this story. My time may be no more valuable than yours, but it is not identical to yours, and my time may slip even further from yours over time. Oh dear, I'm being neither clear nor timely. As Albert Einstein warned, if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. So with no further waste of your time, let's take this story here to the Griffith Park dog park. Laura Danley is the astronomer and science educator who serves as curator of the Griffith Observatory right up there over the hill. And Laura, the little guy over there with the Einstein hairdo, that's Dennis. He's a cutie. I've got a really simple question.

What is time? Ooh, that's not a simple question. We think we know what time is because we have watches that tick along and let us know how time has passed. But in fact, time is a very elusive and kind of difficult subject in the universe. Time is malleable. It's elastic. It's squishy. It's squishy, and it stretches and it shrinks depending on, well, a couple of things.

Not only is time stretchy and squishy, but space is stretchy and squishy as well. If we get into a spaceship and travel very, very fast, we'll find that time ticks more slowly and we won't age as quickly. Even little Dennis here, quite a bit smaller than us, when he really gets to tearing across the park here, which he's now done a couple of times, time has actually moved more slowly for him than as we sense it. Dennis is a fast little dog. And when he's tearing along at top speed, in fact, time is ticking just a little bit slower. Now, when I say just a little, I mean minuscule amounts, because even as fast as Dennis is, he's nowhere near as close to the speed of

light. Why in all of human history didn't somebody else notice this before this obscure patent clerk in Switzerland? The effect is so, so small that it's imperceptible to us at everyday speeds and everyday scale. Now, I thought you'd say that, which is why I called Tom Jones. Tom is the scientist, pilot, and author who chronicled his four space shuttle flights in his book, Skywalking. He's now working on Ask the Astronaut. So just how fast were you going? 17,500 miles per hour. That's about five miles every second. Still a lot less than even one percent of the speed of light. Did you figure out how far you

might have fallen behind the rest of us due to relativity over those 53 days? Matt, all I can tell you is what I looked up referring to special relativity, thanks to Albert Einstein. It looks like I fell behind the rest of the human race by about three milliseconds, three thousandths of a second. Yeah, the effect of time that Tom experiences by traveling quickly in space is an effect of special relativity, and that's just a special case of Einstein's general relativity. It focuses on how time is changed by the presence of mass and energy. To give an example, a black hole, the extreme example, inside the black hole, time actually comes to a stop.

Special relativity focuses on how time changes when you're traveling fast. Every physicist I've ever talked to about this is just thrilled by General Relativity. Are you part of that club? Oh, absolutely. It's one of my favorite things to talk about because it's crazy. Nobody in their right mind, sorry Einstein, but in their right mind think that this was true. So it really took tremendous insight to figure that out. Laura, it's been nice to spend some time with you. You too, Matt. And with little Dennis. Dennis, come on, it's time to go. There are a lot of great books and websites about time and relativity. And there are a lot of wonderful quotes from the guy who laid it out a century or more ago, like this one. When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second.

When you sit on a red hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That is relativity. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its deep-digging members. Daniel Gunn is our associate

producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.