Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Getting Humans to Mars

Episode Date: May 31, 2016

Three NASA leaders talk with host Mat Kaplan about the progress we're making toward leaving footprints on the Red Planet.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'll get humans to 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. Three of NASA's top aces will tell us about the tremendous challenges we face and the steady progress we're making toward footprints on the red planet. Bill Nye and Bruce Betts also check in, and senior editor Emily Lakdawalla is right around the corner. Did you notice? That's the gorgeous new arrangement of our theme you hear in the background. You online listeners will be treated to the entire tune at the end of today's

show. Here's Emily. Emily, this week you've got at least a couple of blog entries to look at from the 25th and the 26th of May. Both images taken by folks that you've been in contact with. I'm most interested in this one from the 25th where you actually asked somebody to take a look at something old. I had been using in a talk an example of a somewhat garishly colored official release of an image of Saturn from the Voyager missions. And I wanted to compare and contrast it with what it would look like if you were actually there. So I asked one of my image processing friends, Ian Regan, to take a look at that data set. And he found a really nice one with

the whole globe of Saturn tilted with several of its icy moons poised in front of it. It's just very pretty. And it's accompanied by some images of the moon Ganymede. Yeah, actually, that was the trigger for this post was this amazing new color global portrait of Ganymede put together by Bjorn Johnson. He's been working on it for quite some time. The problem with this one was that it was color, it was global, but several of the frames for the image were smeared, and that was giving him a very difficult time trying to put it together into a full global view. It's something nobody has ever managed to do before.

But finally, thanks to a conversation at unmannedspaceflight.com with somebody else who has also been working on smeared datasets, he found a new way to deconvolve the smearing and produce a nice, crisp portrait of Ganymede that is just lovely. What does this tell us about this worldwide community of image processors? Well, I don't think the insights are terribly deep, but they're worth repeating. And that's that people working together are better than people working alone. And that archiving these data sets for decades in ways that they can be used again, brings rewards in brand new processing,

both for beauty and for science, of data that was so hard won and that we're still getting great science and images out of. We've still got a few seconds left. Could you say something about OSIRIS-REx having arrived in Florida? Yes, for me, this is the start of any spacecraft journey to its eventual destination, the day when it's carefully boxed up in the place that it was first created and then shipped in very scary low-tech methods on trucks and airplanes to get to the launch site. Three months away from launch now, roughly. Very close, and then it'll be

on its way to the asteroid. Fascinating. Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Matt. That Osiris-Rex piece, by the way, that was a May 23rd entry in her blog at planetary.org. You can check it out there. She is our senior editor and the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye is going to be up next. Bill, you know that I talked to Jason Davis and Bruce Betts in the middle of the day-in-the-life test last week for LightSail. I was able to assure the audience that the test went well, but you were also there, and you saw some other things.

Yes, I saw some things. No, there was a problem at the end, an unexpected problem. motor which deploys the booms, which lets the sails to unfurl, allows the sails to unfurl, is a tricky thing in that it has counts. It has digital counts. And what you want to do, what we want to do is get the booms as extended as possible, but we don't want to overextend them, which is possible. So based on light sail A or light sail 1, they had a certain number of counts. They got to the number of counts and the sails were fully deployed, so it seemed, and then they couldn't command it to stop. They couldn't get the motor to turn off.

Ouch. They figured out that the motor has an electromagnetic field around it. It's an electric motor. It's got spinning armatures. And that field just interferes with the antenna just enough to make it not read the signal. It was very cool. So they figured it out and they changed it. Spoken like a good scientist slash engineer, this problem crops up that could have been serious.

And you said, it's really cool. That's right. Yeah. Well, it didn't happen on orbit, as we say. That could have been serious, and you said, it's really cool. That's right, yeah. Well, it didn't happen on orbit, as we say. That would have been a drag. And what would have happened there, they figured the motor would have drawn current long enough to draw the batteries down. Then it would have rebooted automatically and allowed the batteries to recharge and so on and so on. It's just these little decisions in the logic of the software are so important. The software is the key to this thing now.

It's a team. And these guys working, these men and women working together figured it out. So are we apparently go for launch now? I know there'll be other steps between now and then, but sometime later. Let's take some other steps, but we're well on our way. And because SpaceX had its Falcon Heavy delayed, everything's delayed are working perfectly. None of this messing around we had last time. Yeah, it's software.

It's software. The lenses are fine. The charge couple devices are fine. It's getting the telemetry, getting the images sent back down to the earth. So it was cool, Matt. It went from that little antenna in the garage with glass doors through the glass out to an antenna at the other end of the Cal Poly campus, then back through the glass doors to the spacecraft. It was very cool. Very cool indeed. I wish I'd been there next time and certainly for the launch

as we take one step at a time. Yes, the launch is going to be exciting. If your members think about being in Cocoa Beach next spring, probably. I'm shooting from the hip here, but probably around March. Not too long to wait. Thank you, Matt. is going to be exciting if your members think about being in Cocoa Beach next spring. Probably, I'm shooting from the hip here, but probably around March. Not too long to wait. Thank you, Matt. That's the CEO of the Planetary Society. We take you now to another place where he was, and I was, Washington, D.C. a couple of weeks ago for the Humans to Mars Summit and the panel that I conducted looking out toward Mars. It was pretty exciting to be in a room full of Mars fans like yours truly, and the people who are working hard to get us there, ranging from NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman

to Buzz Aldrin. I helped out with the webcast at the Humans to Mars Summit, a three-day event held at George Washington University. You can watch it all on the Explore Mars livestream channel. Explore Mars is the group that puts on the summit each year, and it's a close partner of the Planetary Society. On the morning of May 17th, I took the role of moderator and welcomed three top NASA reps who were at the center of the Planetary Society. On the morning of May 17th, I took the role of moderator and welcomed three top NASA reps who were at the center of the decades-long effort to put humans on Mars. Steve Jerzyk serves as Associate Administrator of the Space Technology Mission

Directorate at NASA Headquarters. He came there after serving as Director of the agency's Langley Research Center. Jim Free is another former center director. He ran the Glenn Research Center for three years before moving to NASA HQ just two months ago. Now he's deputy director of the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. Rick M. Davis is also at NASA headquarters, where he is assistant director for science andoration in the Science Mission Directorate. He's a bridge between that science-devoted side of the agency and the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. He co-leads a study that has begun the identification of potential landing sites on Mars for humans.

Three different directorates, but all working toward that Red Planet goal. Our topic was the how and why of humans to Mars, but we concentrated on the how, as you're about to hear. A couple of notes, you'll hear references to TRL. It stands for Technology Readiness Level, and ranges from 1 to 9, with 9 representing technologies that have been flight proven on successful missions. The Devo you'll hear mentioned is the great Deva Newman, who we already mentioned is Deputy Administrator of NASA. She had spoken just before my panel got underway. Are we on the many converging paths that are going to get humans to Mars in the 2030s.

Steve, would you like to start? Sure. So, yeah, as was described before, we have quite a few challenges to get humans on Mars. We have to evolve capabilities that we have now, like environment control and life support systems and in-space repulsion systems. And then we have to develop entirely new capabilities like those needed for in situ resource utilization

and surface power to support those systems and other systems on the surface of Mars. So yeah, we know that we still have several architectural options and we continue to trade those options. But we know, regardless of what the architecture ends up being, and we're a decade or more from deciding on all the details of that architecture, we know that there are certain capabilities and certain technologies that are required to enable those architectures. Evolving some capabilities and creating whole new ones.

Dava mentioned the entry, Andrew Sinton landing challenge. That's when she responded to the Red Dragon question. That's a very large challenge. Right now, we still essentially use the Viking technology with respect to the vehicle plan form and the supersonic parachute technology to get from about, I don't know, 15,000 miles an hour to zero in seven minutes through a very thin

atmosphere. We can land one metric ton right now, and we're going to have to land probably 18 to 23 for the ascent vehicle to get crew off the surface and back to the earth. So we're just one of many challenges. But we know, regardless of architecture and the details of how we're going to get there, But we know, regardless of architecture and the details of how we're going to get there, we are working very hard to develop those capabilities and technologies using, right now, the International Space Station and ground-based testing, in-space testing with robotic spacecraft, robotic missions to Mars. We're learning a tremendous amount scientifically and technologically. technologically. And then as we push out beyond low Earth orbit into cislunar space, there's a lot to be done there and proven there even before we move out and onto Mars. Jim, Rick? What's amazing to me, I actually came out of the human spaceflight world and now work in the science side of the house, which has been a really exciting change for me. One of the things that's amazing is if you look at this chart, this is a list of all the missions that have gone to Mars. The United States is the only one that's actually made it to the surface. We hope to

change that here shortly. And we work with our international partners as well as soon our commercial partners to actually make that possible because there is a tremendous amount to learn. I spent 12 years in an ISS flight control room. And I will tell you, if there was a mantra that we have in the flight control room, it's in space is dangerous, on the surface is safe. And sometimes I think we transpose that to Mars and we assume that in space is dangerous and on the surface is safe. I would actually say with everything we've learned across all these missions

and with our current level of technology on the surface of Mars is dangerous for us. And we need to step our way and build up our understanding of what it takes to do that. What we've learned in the science side of the house executing these robotic missions is that we need a cadence of missions that actually, because you essentially are limited to these 26-month launch window opportunities, and so you don't get many opportunities to actually learn about Mars. And so the point being is that by doing a steady set of missions that are logically sequenced, that are building and ultimately building to humans being there, we can solve these problems and actually make tremendous headway. I love how that gets bluer and bluer. We're getting better

at this. I also have to correct you because Jan Warner of ESA already yelled at me once when I said that they had never been landed on the surface. He said, oh, yes, Beagle landed. It just didn't talk back to us. Exactly. That's right. We do have orbit imagery of Beagle on the surface. It just never came back. It never came back. That's true.

But the moral of the story really is that Mars is hard. We should not take it for granted. But as Davis said, by working together, we can do this, and we just need to piece the pieces together. All right. So the good news is coming. We've also heard already about some of the essential technologies in various areas that are underway right now.

Let's start with SLS Orion. Things moving forward. Absolutely, they are. Dr. Newman talked about our journey to Mars. What we're doing now is breaking down that journey to Mars, breaking down into further phases with more granularity objectives for each. The important thing is to remember that we're exploring Mars today, both with the rovers that we have, but also with the technology we're developing on ISS. We can't overlook the importance of ISS. Dr. Newman mentioned that. What we've taken now is all the phases in between there

and come up with objectives for each. Objectives like in phase zero on ISS. How do you do things with autonomous crew? In phase one, where we have these defined decision gates at the end, we're trying to develop some more autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, which will be demonstrated on ARM. So we're heading in that direction and building, Matt, off of what you asked. Today, this is the EM-1 Exploration Mission 1 crew module

at the Kennedy Space Center shortly after it was delivered last year. It's undergoing outfitting now, first of some of the essential structure that was used to validate the proof pressure test, which was done just two weeks ago. We went to 1.25 times the operating pressure. We're now adding secondary structure to the vehicle, some 500 plus pieces of secondary structure to the vehicle. So well on its way to the 2018 EM1 mission. In parallel,

we're working on the service module. We talk international. That's being developed by the Europeans. Actually, I'm going to Germany later today to have an event with the Europeans to celebrate delivery of the structural hardware for the EM-1 service module. On SLS, we're developing the tanks. They're being developed at Michoud in Louisiana, where the oxygen and hydrogen tanks are being assembled using in this incredible

tooling. I mean, the tooling itself is an engineering marvel with friction stir welding. So we have the hardware in development. Again, the theme is we're developing the hardware going to Mars. We have our engine testing underway at Stennis Space Center, testing the RS-25, the former shuttle engine, expanding the envelope for this engine, using it well beyond what was ever intended for the space shuttle, operating at 109% thrust level, all new controllers. Eventually, it will operate at 111% of its original operating parameters. And at the Kennedy Space Center in the Vehicle Assembly Building, you can actually see the outline of half of the SLS there. You can see the solid rocket motor outline in the platform

with the core stage outline. The platforms are going into the VAB for this massive vehicle. And we're also working on the hardware that will, it will ride out to the pad on the mobile launch platform where all the systems go into the platform itself. At the bottom there, you think it's just a piece of structure holding it up. The systems in there for software, for air, for propellants are just incredible. And then, of course, they all have to run up to the towers across umbilicals. So that's my one minute on how are things going on SLS. Not a lot of progress. There's a solid rocket booster test coming up? There is. June 28th. June 28th. Okay.

The second one in Utah. And that tank assembly where the tank was being welded, you talked about how innovative that is. It's done vertically. It is, yes. So the segments go in and come out. It's almost like a PEZ dispenser. Let's keep going. We've already heard a little bit about developments in solar electric propulsion, and that really it's a question more of scale, since electric propulsion is coming on strong across the board for commercial payloads as well, commercial satellites. But what about nuclear thermal propulsion, the kind of stuff we saw in the movie The Martian that was driving that huge ship? They didn't make a big deal about it, but they do mention at one point that there was a nuclear reactor on that vehicle.

Yep. So first, a little bit about, talking a little bit about high-power solar electric repulsion. So Jim Zoll Center, now the Glenn Research Center, really did a great job in developing two critical technologies for high-power solar electric repulsion. One are large-area solar arrays to provide the energy and power to drive the engines, and those were with two industry partners. DSS developed a rollout Celerae concept, and Orbital ATA developed their kind of fan-full Megaflex concept. And those were developed very successful ground demonstration units and tested. And actually, they're starting to be commercialized

in the commercial communication satellites where they need higher powers. The other technology was the higher power hall thrusters, magnetically shielded to improve lifetime, 12 and a half kilowatt thrusters. And we're actually in the process of awarding a contract to develop the flight hardware for that, for the asteroid redirect robotic mission. So lots of good progress there. Now to get to actually answer your question, we have been working nuclear thermal propulsion technology at a low level for years. This year, Space Technology Mission Director at NASA is picking it up in our game-changing development program. And we're focused right now on developing the fuel for a reactor for a nuclear thermal propulsion system.

And so we'd like to move from highly enriched uranium fuel to low enriched uranium fuel. We think it'll be, we have processes that will lower the cost of producing it and reduce the infrastructure. And we also believe it'll be less costly in the end with respect to handling and security. So very fundamental low technology readiness level work in low enriched uranium fuel for the reactor. We're also going to do in-house and with industry system studies to look at what would a nuclear thermal propulsion system architecture look like using a reactor based on that fuel. And so that's a two- to three-year effort, depending on how the progress goes, in which case, if we're successful, we'll then roll into more of a reactor-slash-engine development activity for a ground demonstration. engine development activity for a ground demonstration. But the motivation for doing that is to reduce trip time for crew. That is the motivation. There are many human health and

performance challenges with now 18-month mission durations given the current chemical propulsion technology. And so we're really looking at advancing what we call rapid transit technologies like nuclear thermal propulsion to reduce trip time for crew. I know NASA has been working closely, pretty closely with Franklin Chang Diaz, the Ad Astra folks on that variation of what will end up being nuclear propulsion. And I assume that's moving forward too. Actually, that's what I call very high power electric propulsion, right? The VASB and other technologies, which are 100 kilowatt type systems versus the 12 and a half that we have now. That's actually through Human Exploration Operations Mission Director Advanced Exploration Systems looking at advancing the very high power electric propulsion technology as another rapid transit capability and approach. Down the line, way down the line.

Rick? And I just want, as sort of an end user of the technologies that they're developing, and Steve's director, I would say that solar electric is something very exciting for us because I'll give you an example. We are exploring an option for an orbiter around Mars. The current MRO has been an amazing bird. It's 10 years old, and it's past its design lifetime, so we're trying to figure out what we need.

And the big thing that's screaming right now, really from a perspective of human spaceflight combining with science, is a new reconnaissance bird that actually can find water. And what's really neat is that with solar electric, you have a very efficient way of getting that bird out there. It can be bigger than what we've done previously, which will mean, and even more importantly, when the satellite arrives at Mars,

it has abundant power that we have always been short of in the Mars exploration program because we're not using it for thrusters anymore. And so what we can do is take that power, redirect it to a radar system potentially, and really find out where the near-surface water deposits, which we know are significant on Mars, but we haven't been able to get the right radars there previously.

So here's a case where technology is relatively near-term that's being developed. It's actually really enabling very exciting missions that really were not possible previously. We've learned that, you know, taking baby steps, you want to do the far-out investments too, but also bringing them in and actually using them as soon as you can is the way you also learn. And we're very thrilled about this. I want to mention just in passing there was a contract just awarded to one of our sponsors here today, Aerojet Rocketdyne, for development of advanced solar electric propulsion.

Correct. Those would be the development of the 12.5 kilowatt thrusters and the drive electronics for the asteroid redirect robotic mission hardware. Yep. Let's quickly talk about getting down to the surface. You said, and this is better than I thought, up to, you said 18 to 23 tons? Three, yes. Yeah, okay.

Well, better than 30 tons. It used to be 30. We're finding the architecture and applying new technologies and getting it. The range right now is 18 to 23. Yeah, well, I'm told, I think Adam Stelter, Rick Manning, two of the guys who know how to get stuff down to the surface who are trying to figure this out right now are out there in the audience someplace. Are we looking good? Are we going to figure this out? Are we looking good? So that's kind of a loaded question. But so, yeah, so we are developing a suite of technologies to try to land larger masses on the surface of Mars. So first, kind of the first step would be a robotic Mars round-trip mission. And oh, by the way, while we're going round-trip, we might as well bring some samples back. So that's in

collaboration with the Science Mission Directorate. Yeah, Science Mission Directorate, right, the Mars Sample Return Mission. And we're looking at the ascent vehicle for that mission, depending on how much sample we want to bring back of three to five metric tons. So that's getting from one to three to five, and that would be a challenge but something we can do in the nearer term. So there are several ways we can do that. One is a better aerodynamic drag device, and that could be a larger and more effective supersonic parachute. It also could be an inflatable that we use at supersonic speeds

that we successfully demonstrated on the low- supersonic decelerator project so that was the good news on LDSD we demonstrated the inflatable twice in a high-altitude test flight but not so good news was the supersonic parachute failed twice structurally failed twice so there's a lot of work to do and understanding the deployment dynamics of supersonic parachutes, including modeling of very chaotic turbulent flows and the interaction of those flows with a very flexible structure. So we've got some work to do there in both modeling and simulation and physical understanding of that. But we're going to continue to do that and understand that better and figure

out if designing a supersonic parachute is feasible with a better drag performance than the disc gap band parachute that we use now. Also, there's supersonic retrorepulsion, which is an alternative to decelerate from supersonic speeds down to subsonic speeds. Hopefully, the first test of supersonic retrorepulsion on Mars will be through our collaboration with SpaceX on Red Dragon. Red Dragon is going to be on the five to six metric ton scale on crew vehicle, and their plan is to slow down from supersonic speeds all the way down to the surface using retro repulsion. And so for NASA, it's an entry, descent, and landing technology demonstration opportunity, and that was one of our prime motivations for collaborating with SpaceX on that.

And then there's terminal descent and landing technology, one of our prime motivations for collaborating with SpaceX on that. And then there's terminal descent and landing technology, and we decided to fly terrain-relative navigation on the Mars 2020 mission. And so using imagery and 3D elevation maps, we can do hazard avoidance in real time. And that actually is interesting because it opens up some landing sites that are scientifically interesting but would be too dangerous to land on due to rocks and slopes. But now we can't with the terrain relative navigation, we could land on that. So precision landing and autonomous landing and hazard avoidance is also an enabler for

EDL. So lots of challenges there, but we've got a lot of tech development going on to try to develop the technologies to first enable a Mars sample return mission and then eventually the human missions to Mars. I'm glad that Rob and Adam are both here because they and their teams have been the gurus for getting into Mars. But really, this is a tri-directorate thing, and Steve's guys are heading it up. But the bottom line is it's about getting all the right smart people together. This nut can be cracked, and they're making substantial headway. And it's really kind of exciting to see this evolve and to enable the types of things that Steve just described.

Did I say Rick Manning before? I think I did. It's Rob. Yeah, it's Rob, of course. Many times. Sorry, Rob. Steve Jurczyk, Jim Free, and Rick Davis of NASA with me on stage at the recent Humans to Mars Summit. Jim Free and Rick Davis of NASA with me on stage at the recent Humans to Mars Summit. Much more of our conversation about how we'll get men and women to the red planet is just ahead. This is Planetary Radio. This is Robert Picardo.

I've been a member of the Planetary Society since my Star Trek Voyager days. You may have even heard me on several episodes of Planetary Radio. Now I'm proud to be the newest member of the Board of Directors. I'll be able to do even more to help the Society achieve its goals for space exploration across our solar system and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org. I'll see you there. Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration? Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. You can learn that answer, and what all the other candidates think, at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help.

If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, this week bringing you most of my recent conversation with three leaders of NASA who are working very hard to get humans to Mars. That's the title of the summit that brought us together at George Washington University in mid-May. Steve Jerzyk is Associate Administrator of the Space Technology Mission Directorate. Jim Free is Deputy Director of the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.

And Rick Davis is Assistant Director for Science and Exploration in the Science Mission Directorate. for Science and Exploration in the Science Mission Directorate. You can watch our uncut conversation, including PowerPoint slides, on the Explore Mars livestream channel. We've got the link on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. Very quickly, life support. We haven't achieved yet anything like what's going to be necessary to send these people out with no resupply for the two or three years that they're going to be making that round trip. How is that coming along?

So that's where I get back to what we're doing on ISS today, right? We have goals that are set for what we think we need around Mars and hopefully get a chance to talk about architecture, but those are going to drive the architecture and we're trying to prove those systems out today. Oxygen recovery as an example, you know, 42, 47 percent on ISS today. We're trying to get to 75 percent for these long-duration missions. The place to test that out is on ISS. We're doing that today through some of the systems we're sending up, through what we have planned to do in the near term where we're going to dedicate four racks on ISS to advanced ECLSS systems. That's the criticality of getting ISS the extension,

which we have the 2024, and getting systems built and up there. And life support also goes into fire safety. Fire safety is another element of life support that we're testing today. We have an experiment, and this will be my Glenn's research center, Homer, here for a second. I still have center blood running through me. We're doing a large-scale fire experiment on Cygnus

when it departs June 14th. We're gonna light a large-scale fire. Such a cool experiment. It's great. But we're using low Earth orbit today to test those systems out that we're going to need for Mars. And our goals are what we need at Mars. So it's not just haphazard, how are we picking?

It's what we need out at Mars. You know, on station, eight years is going to go by really fast. And we were at a point now with the 50% of the experiment time that CASIS has to offer to commercial researchers and technologists, and the 50% that NASA has, we are more than oversubscribed with crew time available to do the experimentation. And so we are really gonna have to prioritize, particularly on the NASA side,

what are the critical things to get done on station before 2024 and we move out into cislunar space. And advancing life support technology is really critical. We gotta get the efficiency way up. I'm not sure we have to completely close the loop, but that would be ideal, but we gotta get the efficiency way up. And we've gotta get the reliability way up

because if you've evolved in station at all, you know how things kind of in general, but on the life support system side kind of break down regularly, and we definitely have to get the reliability up. So yeah, Jim mentioned oxygen recovery and CO2 scrubbing. Also, we developed and delivered rapid cycle aiming technology for better, more efficient CO2 scrubbing. And we're also looking at advanced technologies for the portable life support system for the future, you know, EVA suits and surface suits. And so we develop things like variable oxygen regulators and better, you know, better scrubbing technology for the, for the place, for the portable life

support system. So that is really critical. And then we're looking at even more advanced and more kind of far out concepts which couple environmental life support and ISRU say food production, plant growth that also could provide not only food, but also CO2 absorption and oxygen generation, right? We call those bioregenerative systems. And so we're looking at investing in research, lower TRL level research and technology development

and things like bioregenerative systems where you're trying to create a mini ecosystem. So ISRU, Institute of Resource Utilization. Can I come back to that theme, though? And so in my sort of opening comments, I talked about how hard Mars is. But part of that, it's hard because we don't know it and we don't build it into our architecture as much as maybe we need to. The interesting thing about ECLIS for me personally is that, you know, you mentioned a thousand, you know, with a thousand days or three years. Well, reality is we're probably going to pre-position

supplies and logistics in a Mars parking orbit. So really you're not talking three years. You're talking a much smaller amount of time that actually does start to approximate what we've learned on ISS. And so building that into the whole equation and potentially even pre-positioning on the surface of the planet, that really offloads what the technologies need to be there. I was actually in the ISS flight control when we put the urine processing assembly on board, which was not ready for prime time. I might add at the time. But the point being is we got through it. We got the parts on there. And if you have that logistics supply chain in place, you can make really amazing

things happen. Habitation modules. Nobody's going to want to live in Orion for three years. We've seen the Bigelow module just attached to ISS. Great step at understanding the challenges and benefits of inflatable modules.

Our next step, broad area announcement on habitation just went out phase two. We're doing phase one with a number of companies right now, looking for those innovative ideas on how to do habitation. Our international partners want to play in habitation. do habitation. Our international partners want to play in habitation. When we talk about the architecture, the elements we have to develop are multi-destination capable. We need a habitation, as you say. If I got to go to space, I would probably live in Orion for three years. Yes. But we do need that habitation space for some of these systems we have to take and give the crew resources, a place to do science on their way, a place to stage EVAs from to do further work. So those multiple elements of how we're developing

HAB right now, I think, are leading us to what is our next step. And then that feeds into the architecture. What kind of HAB do we need? Do we want to design a HAB for cislunar and then another one for deep space? Probably not an affordable path to do both. We might have to find a compromise in there to do a modular HAB. So I think it's important to point out that we're looking at multiple paths to do that, and that international piece, of course, plays into it. Just one more comment on Rick's statement on the urine processor. Some of the ECLos systems for ISS were tests on the ground for five years, and they went to orbit and gummed up right away. That tells us

we can't afford to do that again. We have to get those systems up into microgravity as soon as possible and understand those right away. So you'll see that while we'll do some ground development, our focus is getting things on ISS. Back to in situ, living off the land. We're not going to be able to bring, you know, to import potato fertilizer the way Mark Watney did. Yep. If Mark had a little bit of ISR technology, you wouldn't have to MacGyver it, I say, as much as he did, because he was like MacGyver up there. It's critical. If we're going to do human exploration of the solar system safely and affordably, I think ISRU is a critical capability that we need, and we need to develop technologies. And it's one of the new capabilities

that we need to develop that we haven't had needed in the past. So it's everything from producing fuel on the surface to building materials. We talked, David talked a little bit about 3D printing to growing food, right? And so we're starting with a demonstration of ISRU on Mars 2020 called MOXIE. It's on the rover for 2020, and it's going to produce oxygen from atmospheric CO2. So we're going to kind of demonstrate that it can be done at very small scale in a relatively small package. And that's one way to generate oxygen. But also, there's quite a bit of water on Mars, right? And if we can extract it and get it out of the surface, get it out of the soil, you know, that provides another opportunity not only for water, but for hydrogen and oxygen.

So I would say, to build on Steve's comment, that's actually one of the exciting things we've learned in the recent past, is that there are significant quantities of water on Mars. And, you know, I actually once upon a time was a history major, and I will tell you, if you look at human exploration, the humans are generally going to where there's water. Follow the water. Follow the water. And I think the same thing will happen on Mars.

And the good news is now we know there's significant amounts of water. Follow the water. And I think the same thing will happen on Mars. And the good news is now we know there's significant amounts of water. There are old oceans that are essentially covered with a very thin layer of regolith on top of them. There's glaciers. We know this now. We know that there's minerals that could potentially be harvested for water. And so there's a whole range of these things. And so there's two pieces that are really kind of fast-breaking. We're beginning to realize that that water may drive where the human landing site gets set up. There is a piece

of recon that we need to do because the previous orbiters, like I said, did not have high power available to them. So we couldn't figure out. We answered a lot of really important science questions in terms of deep aquifers being available or not. But what we need to know is where the near-surface water ice is, if you will, so that that can be harvested. And in fact, that could even drive where we end up setting up as a semi-permanent base. Very exciting things, new things. We're going to need a lot of new ideas to really flush this out. And then once we find it, which we can largely do from on orbit, but then we'll have to ground truth it and we'll have to have the technologies actually extract it. I mean, you're talking in an atmosphere that has an extremely low density and

very cold. And so there's some really amazing challenges just figuring out how to do that. And so I would sort of see this as sort of the next area of essentially recon and tech development that needs to come up. Yeah, a little bit more about 3D printing. We have several efforts going on, including a centennial challenge to use Martian regolith, not a lot of water, and not a lot of power, and trash, inorganic trash, plastics, for example, to 3D print the components and then assemble those components into a habitat. So we're leveraging the 3D printing technology there. And then food, we got a lot of work to do there. We've had some station experiments like Veggie, and how do you grow food with not a lot of water that's volumetrically efficient and resource efficient? And also, over time, given the space environment of microgravity and radiation, will that food maintain its nutritional value?

Will it actually provide nutrition for the crew? And so that's work that's going to be done on the ISS and will continue to be done on the ISS and on the ground. So it's really important. Without that, the logistics train for humans to Mars is going to be just unaffordable and architectures don't close. Jim is absolutely right. Depending on how much ISRU you assume you can do

based on the technology and the capabilities, it enables or closes off different architectural options. And then Rick is absolutely right in that we are gonna have to have these systems on the surface of Mars well ahead of crew. They have to be autonomous, they have to be reliable, and they have to produce the things that we're gonna need to sustain crew on the

surface and get them back off of in a way that we have high confidence in before we push off to Mars. I hope we're giving everybody here an even better idea of just how hard this is going to be to pull off in less than 20 years. On top of all of this, all of these converging technologies that are still in development, they all have to come together. They all have to be integrated. Is that happening as well? I had mentioned earlier the architecture work going on. And a lot of people want to build architecture from left to right, right? Because we can, I said the worst enemy to any design now is we can do CADs. Everybody believes, well, you did the CAD.

It looks great. You can go there now. If you build it left to right, you may not be optimizing what you need at your end. If you build it right to left, you may never build an architecture that closes. So we're trying that integration piece. We're trying to do that in both directions.

There's things we need, like Steve talked about, in terms of landed mass. There's things we need in terms of systems. There's a gear ratio, what that takes to get it off the surface here on Earth, assemble it somewhere in some orbit, and push on. That's the trade that's happening in both directions right now. The answer to your question, Matt, is the integration is happening. The architecture work is going on through our future capabilities team,

some of our exploration architecture work that merges all three of our mission directorates into that process so that we understand if we're going 47% to 75% and we get to 75%, then this is how much we have to take or how much we have to pre-position. This is the number of stages we need

back driving to how many launches we need. So that absolutely is happening and trying to inform our planning, both schedule and budget-wise. Yeah. So I would say about 90% or more of the budget that Space Technology Mission Director has goes into what I call pull technologies and technologies that are being pulled by mission requirements. And those requirements come from human exploration and the architecture studies in the near term and Science Mission Director and what not only the Planetary Science Division wants to do in the future, but also astrophysicsysics heliophysics and earth science and so we get the requirements and we develop the technologies that will enable the capabilities

that they need to enable the missions of the future and human exploration of the solar system and then we deliver those technologies a lot of times to missions or to test beds and demonstrate them in the system because there's technology at this level but there's also something called integration readiness level you know you might beRL-6 and ready to go fly on the bench with your component or subsystem, but until you integrate them in the system and operate in the environment, you're not ready to go fly in an operational mission

or in a science mission. And so that is something that, particularly with my directorate and HEOMD Advanced Exploration Systems. And then Mike Siebel, I've got to shout out to Mike. He's doing a really great job as the science mission director chief technologist in making sure we understand the missions of the future across the four science mission directorates. And we're delivering technologies that can enable not only some of the decadal survey missions maybe more affordably,

but the missions that will come in the next decadal surveys for Science Mission Directorate. Rick, I was just going to say, do you want to add anything? Well, these guys have really covered it. The only thing I would say maybe is just two points. One, Jim Watson, who heads up our Mars Exploration Program, we're here. What he would say is that we need to get out there

and incrementally start building up these capabilities, actually doing them, because that's really where you learn what is there. Then I would say maybe a secondary thing, which I'm sure these guys would echo too, is that we can't be afraid of failure. We do our homework. We do the best we can do, and then we go out there and try it and try it and make sure it actually works, because you're going to learn more even from the bad days than you're

going to learn from just sitting at a desk. Do you want to add anything to how the robots are helping us along this path? Yeah, I'd love to. We have four major goals, like one's follow the water. So this is the fleet of our current and soon-to-be missions at Mars. One of our major goals of these missions is to actually close what we call strategic knowledge gaps. But these are things that we have defined within the agency that are things we really need to know to be able to safely send people there.

And you can start seeing an amazing number of other international partners starting to move out into the Martian system now. There's so much we're not going to be able to get to today, but Rick, if you could continue for a moment. I mentioned during your intro this process that is underway that you're co-leading to select the landing site for men and women on Mars. So we started this about a year and a half ago. We're very excited about it. It started out as a joint SMD-HUMD effort, and then STMD has actually participated as well.

So it's really a tri-directorate thing. And we're very excited about it because, one, we have this fleet that you're seeing right here. They're getting older, and we want to actually use this fleet to help us start to narrow down the process of picking where we're going to send humans. And one thing coming out of the Evolvable Mars campaign, which is run out of the human spaceflight directorate, we've got this idea now that we're not going, the lunar model is not what we want to do. We want to actually have a semi-permanent base. That's actually learning

from McMurdo in Antarctica. Really any other major exploration area has had essentially a transportation node where you can deliver supplies, logistics, spare parts, all the things that people will need to stay alive. And so what you're seeing here is what we call an exploration zone. In the center is a landing site. And the exploration zone is a 100 kilometer radius circle. And what we challenged in an open call

is to have people propose potential exploration zones that really included diverse science and also institute resources or feedstocks to supply that. And we were really amazed at both the number of proposals that we received as well as the quality of those proposals. And really, there are many people in this room, I bet, who actually supported that process. And it's been incredible to watch all these teams work together to bring this together. And we are learning a ton as a result of it. There's going to be a new president, a new administration, very soon, less than a year. Is this going to mean new priorities for space exploration? We all know

NASA administrators for decades have said what we need is continuity in purpose and in funding. Yeah, so I think what Jim discussed is what we're doing right now to more clearly lay out our plans for human exploration of the solar system, particularly in the near term on ISS and in cislunar space. And so on ISS, it's pretty clear the things that we need to get done, and we are doing those things right now and have for many years. In cislunar space, we're going to have EM-1, which is the first flight of Orion and SLS uncrewed, EM-2, which will be the first crewed flight. And then there's a succession of flights to cislunar space using Orion and SLS, most likely with a habitation module in orbit around the moon to prove out the trans-habitation capability that we need. So it's really up to us to lay out those plans in a very concrete way

to connect the dots for the administration on where we are and how do we get to humans on Mars, as well as the importance of it, right? That's kind of what this summit is all about. Also, we need to think about, in implementing civil space policy and what NASA needs to do, and Mr. Mars is a part of that, how can we maybe address other priority policy goals of a new administration? We've been an instrument of foreign policy, significant instrument of foreign policy over the history of NASA. We've been an instrument of economic policy, particularly with the current administration,

We've been an instrument of economic policy, particularly with the current administration, education policy, et cetera. So the question is, you know, understanding what the policy, the bigger policy objectives are, maybe the broader policy objectives are for the administration, how can what we're doing in civil place help to move the ball and address those? NASA's Steve Jerzyk, Jim Free, and Rick Davis with me at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C. on May 17th. with me at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C. on May 17th. I want to thank Explore Mars for giving me the opportunity to talk with him and to share our conversation with you. We close as we always do with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society.

Welcome back. Thank you. What are you going to tell us about Mars? I know I'm boring, but now's the time. Every 26 months is the best time to see Mars, and this is it. The brightest it's been for more than a decade, brightest it'll be until 2018 when it will be brighter. But still, I encourage you to go out and see it. It's over in the evening east or southeast. It is the brightest star-like object over there.

It is brighter than any star in the sky right now. It is near yellowish Saturn, which is much dimmer at the moment, and the red star Antares, which is also dimmer, because I don't know if I mentioned it, but Mars is really bright right now. You know what I remembered? I remembered that 11 years ago, the last time Mars was this bright or even brighter, closer, we were throwing a birthday party for Ray Bradbury, the original Martian. We were indeed. Not as bright as it was then, but still awfully stunningly bright right

now. All right, we move on to this week in space history. Appropriately in mars land 1971 mariner 9 was launched which it would become the first mars orbiter 1966 surveyor 1 landed on the moon becoming the first u.s soft lander on the moon or or anywhere else in the solar system we move on to Random Space Fact And this R rolling is a big hit with a lot of people in the audience, though not everyone, I suppose. Glad I could help. As seen from Earth, Mars is nearly a hundred times brighter at its brightest than it is at its dimmest.

The difference is mostly due to the distance between the Earth and Mars, but is also affected by how close or far away from the Sun Mars is in its somewhat elliptical orbit. Let's move out one more planet in the solar system for the contest. All right. On what date is Juno scheduled to enter Jupiter orbit? How'd we do, Matt? Juno scheduled to enter Jupiter orbit.

How'd we do, Matt? I have to admit that I may have accidentally held down the number of entries this week. We still had a good number, about average. But I didn't update the contest question on the website for a few days. I was busy. I was in Washington. It got away from me. So I apologize to those of you who missed out or got confused.

We still came up with a bunch, and out of those, Random.org has picked Jace Pearson. Jace Pearson, don't know where he's from, but he's an astronomy and formal educator, a NASA solar system ambassador. Juno's going to reach Jupiter on the 4th of July, 2016. He is indeed correct. It's very exciting. A new giant planet's orbiter.

Jace, you lucky guy. You're going to get, you're the first winner, Offworld Trading Company, that great new game, engaging economic strategy game, set on Mars. And because you were the first person chosen by Random.org, you're also going to get a 200-point itelescope.net account. And the next couple of people we've also got coming up here,

they are also winners of Offworld Trading Company. The first of them is Nadav Mayo, I'm not sure I pronounced it correctly, in Israel. Nadav discovered that, at least according to the mission website, Juno's going to be the fastest man-made object out there until it starts to fire its rocket to be inserted into Jupiter orbit. I did not know that. I could buy that, because the others, as they get farther and farther from the sun, slow down as they're being tugged on constantly by the sun. But that's interesting. Katie Fritcher reminded us that Juno is named for the Roman goddess Juno, the wife of Jupiter. And like the Roman goddess, she says, the spacecraft will peer under the clouds of Jupiter.

Her penetrating eye will reveal what mischief the giant is up to. Oh, mischief. Mythological mischief. Katie, you're also going to get a copy of Offworld Trading Company. And Thomas Traneker, not a winner of a prize, but he reminded us that Juno is the first solar-powered spacecraft to reach Jupiter, but probably doesn't mean that Jupiter has gone green just yet. Indeed, it has the largest solar panels of any planetary spacecraft, and the first solar-powered spacecraft to explore the outer solar system.

Finally, this from our friend Martin Hajofsky in Houston, Texas. He says, contrary to mythology, when reading the Declaration of Independence aloud on Julyth, 1776, Thomas Jefferson did not say, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Do you know what I mean? Not the greatest pun, but it was timely. No, I'm impressed. So that's it. You can take us right on to next week, I think. Well, I'm going to bring us back to Mars because I can. At its closest approach, occurring right now in 2016, how big is the disk of Mars in the sky as seen from Earth measured in arc seconds?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. So how big is Mars at closest approach 2016 in arc seconds? You have until Tuesday, June 7th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And once again, we're going to last time we're going to give away three more copies of Off World Trading Company, that online game that Bruce has tried out and gave the the director of science and technology a seal of approval to. That might be a little bit overboard, my saying that.

There's the seal now. And the grand prize winner, once again, a 200-point itelescope.net account. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about boats. Thank you and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. How many times can I say that? I guess Juno's kind of a boat. It's going to sail the skies of Jupiter. That's a stretch. Nevertheless, he joins us every week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its high-flying members. Josh Doyle composed our lovely theme. As promised, here is the exciting new arrangement of that theme by film and TV composer-arranger Peter Schlosser. You'll be hearing it a lot in the weeks to come, but you may not hear it in its entirety again for a long while. Enjoy. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies. Thank you. Thank you.