Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Getting Humans to Mars Without Breaking the Bank

Episode Date: February 18, 2014

NASA scientist Harley Thronson tells us about a new initiative that is figuring out how we will get men and women to the red planet at a reasonable price. You can read their initial report. Emily Lakdawalla reports on Curiosity’s passage over dunes that made engineers nervous. Bill Nye reveals NASA’s plans for a lunar rover that may launch in 2018. Mat Kaplan joins Bruce Betts in a TV studio to record this week’s What’s Up segment. You can watch!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Getting to Mars without breaking the bank, 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. I'm inspired to know that there are people who don't just think that we can send humans to Mars, they think we can send them affordably. That's what Harley Thronson of the American Astronautical Society will tell us today, but only after we hear from Emily Lakdawalla about the latest from Curiosity and from Bill Nye about another rover that may soon head for the moon.

And just to prove that dreams, or at least nightmares, do come true, you'll hear how you can actually see Bruce Betts and me record this week's What's Up. Here's the Planetary Society's senior editor. Emily, a nice long blog entry that you posted on the 13th about Curiosity, which I hope has made it through a particularly difficult part of its path. I don't know about difficult, but it was the first time they've ever tried to cross a large-ish sand dune with Curiosity, so they were being very, very cautious. But Curiosity handled it with absolutely no problem, and now the rover is starting to rack up the

meters again as she drives to the west. You have some great pictures that have been taken, I guess it took a fair amount of bandwidth to do this, of the wheels, those pockmarked holy wheels. I guess this is still a concern. You know, they started noticing a couple of months ago that the rate at which the wheels were accumulating damage had suddenly increased. Now, these wheels, they're made of aluminum. They have a fairly thin surface, and the team totally expected them to get damaged, to get little cracks and holes and things poked in them. But when they started driving across this particularly rocky kind of terrain, they started getting a lot more holes, a lot bigger holes, and they started getting very concerned. And so they started driving very slowly for a while while they thought about what to do.

driving very slowly for a while while they thought about what to do. And it looks like what they've decided to do is to try to find terrain that's a little bit softer than what they've been driving on in the past. So instead of driving on exposed bedrock with lots of pointy, sharp rocks protruding from it, they're now seeking out these places that are kind of low between hills that have accumulated windblown sand. And any of the rocks that are there, they just get pushed down into the soil as curiosity drives over them. I haven't heard from the team whether this has decreased the rate at which the wheels are accumulating holes, but so far it seems pretty good. Say something about this path that they are following, known as the Pink Path.

That's right. Well, they're trying to get to a place that's right now named KMS-9, but which should get a better name if they wind up going there. It's a place where there's some very interesting rocks exposed that they'd like to see. But when they decided to change the material that they wanted to drive on, that meant that they had to change their path to drive there. And the new path to KMS 9 brought them over this sand dune that blocked this gap between two highlands. And so the Pink Path took them over the dune and down the hill, and now they've driven another almost, I think, couple hundred meters since they made the decision to drive across the

dune. They're trucking again. And just very quickly, you make a comparison to Opportunity. Talk about that. They're rightfully concerned about the fact that Curiosity's driving rate slowed down a lot when they got concerned about the wheels, because Curiosity has another five kilometers to drive. But it's instructive to look at what happened when Opportunity bogged down in a sand dune partway through its mission. Before then, Opportunity had been driving along up to 200 meters a day. And then they suddenly found themselves mired in a sand dune. And they spent the next several months driving Opportunity only very short distances before

they got confident enough to drive longer distances again. And that's kind of the place we are with Curiosity right now. They're going to get to longer driving distances. We just have to be patient with the team while they figure out how to apply their new driving rules. Got to be patient and got to be careful, at least until there's an auto club on Mars. That's right. Thanks, Emily.

It's a great overview with an even better one in her February 13 entry at planetary.org. I'll talk to you again next week. See you then, Matt. She's the senior editor and the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Bill, welcome back. We set our sights on the moon. Well, this is to prospect for hydrogen and water. This is the old dream, Matt, is to go to the moon and live off the land. And live off the land would be to get water out of the soil.

Hypothetically, one could consume it as a human. But the other thing is to make fuel. If you can get hydrogen and oxygen and combine them, you could have rocket fuel from the moon. And this thing is going to go in 2018, which in space world is coming right up. Who? What? What are we talking about here?

Oh, NASA. NASA is going to build the Resolve rover having to do with in situ resource management. Which we love. But this is an old idea and somebody said we're finally going to try it. So it looks to me like it's a solar powered rover that will drill into the soil extract these minerals heat them up and try to liberate hydrogen and oxygen this would mean somebody at nasa is thinking again about going to the moon using it as a base to go out farther and deeper into space and then the counter argument matt is what about having to

deal with the moon's gravity when you land and deal with the moon's gravity when you take off, the so-called gravity well. Meanwhile at the moon. Yeah, I wonder if this other effort that is underway gave them any encouragement. Yes, the U2, the Jade Rabbit. The Jade Rabbit is sending back signals, but it's not responding as such. So this is a heck of a thing. The Chinese Space Administration landed this cool rover on the moon. It's made it through two lunar nights, and it's still in touch, still in communication. It's really an extraordinary step. And more power to them.

Exactly. Something to look forward to in 2018 as well. The moon is looming large again in space planning. You hit the nail on the head. I got to think NASA wouldn't be planning this in situ resource rover without the Jade Rabbit. You see? You see? Competition's good in a sense. I couldn't agree more. And I look

forward to talking to you again next week. Thanks, Matt. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society and the Science Guy. We're going to talk about Mars in a moment, but we're going to talk about sending people there affordably. Humans to Mars in 20 years or less, but at what cost? Maybe not the hundreds of billions of dollars that have sometimes been mentioned. I wish I had been there when the Affording Human Exploration of Mars Initiative was launched in December. Like me, you can read the hopeful report that emerged from this workshop at George Washington University. More than 50 space exploration experts had a hand in its creation. One of them was Harley Thronson, Vice President for Programs at the American Astronautical Society

and a senior scientist for advanced concepts in the astrophysics science division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. I recently got Harley on the phone to tell us more. Harley, thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio and also for letting me know about this report on the Mars Affordability Initiative. There sure were a lot of people involved with this. I mean, who are some of the groups and individuals that you brought together there at George Washington University? Yeah, thanks very much. I'm glad to be here. The workshop attempted to bring together individual scientists, engineers, managers, and so on, stakeholders in Mars exploration from around the world, mainly from around the U.S.,

who are interested and have come to believe, on the basis of their own work, work that they've read, that the initial human missions to Mars should be, will be, much less expensive than has heretofore been widely considered. So we had individuals from the major aerospace corporations, academics, NASA centers, individuals who had worked at for, though I know a lot of other folks were involved in putting this together. Is this report generally available to anybody on the web? It is, yes. And we had a writing team of about a dozen individuals, and the report is available on the Explore Mars website. Folks can just use their browser, look for Explore Mars or Explore Mars Incorporated. You can easily find the report there. And we will put a link up to that at the show page for this week's show at planetary.org.

I love the first sentence of the report. I'll read it. There is a growing consensus that within two decades, initial human missions to Mars are affordable, under reasonable assumptions, and with sustained international political support. Do you personally, you think we can pull this off? Oh, absolutely. Not only from my own studies and reading the literature, but after several months, actually probably more than that as we put this workshop together, talking with individuals with different backgrounds, different perspectives,

yes, we think it can be done more than think. We believe that it can be done. It won't be easy. Nothing in human exploration in space is easy. It is all worthwhile. It's going to be a challenge. But yes, with those assumptions, we're confident it can be done. Now I'm going to ask you, why should we send humans to Mars?

But anybody who's listened to this show over the last couple of weeks knows that even the leaders of robotic exploration of Mars think that this is a very necessary step. And in fact, that the robotic work that is delivering so much great science is also a necessary step toward humans on Mars. Do you agree? Oh, yes, absolutely. I should have added that we had a number of representatives of the Mars robotic exploration community from Goddard, from NASA headquarters, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other organizations. Absolutely right. The workshop was oriented toward or was extensively about human exploration,

but our partners in robotic exploration have to be full partners. Why? Why do you think we need to put men and women on that place that's going to be so hard to reach and pretty hard to spend any time on as well? Indeed, yeah. My personal belief, just speaking as one individual, I think that long duration and eventually permanent human occupation of key locations, Mars in this case, is inevitable and desirable. I believe that we ultimately should be a multi-planet species. As you know, there are other folks outside my areas of expertise who support Mars exploration for the adventure, no doubt,

very exciting, for the inspiration of the world, particularly young people, excellent idea as well, and also for scientific exploration. Today, humans, although robotic systems are advancing rapidly and will continue advancing for the foreseeable future, nothing beats a human on site to achieve key scientific goals. So the list of reasons for going to Mars is fairly long. Let's talk about this report and some of the conclusions you made and also some of the opening principles that you adhered to, including the fact that you very consciously avoided talking much about specific technologies that might get us to Mars affordably.

Exactly. This workshop is the first in a series. Three days long, there were only a handful of important issues that we could deal with at one time. We're already in the process of setting up, at one time. We're already in the process of setting up, organizing subsequent workshops that will deal with issues that we didn't deal with last month in greater depth. Again, technology, motivations for going to Mars, different scenarios for how to go there affordably were touched on, but the in-depth assessments, debates debates and discussion are yet to come. So this is just the first step along this road. Exactly. I'll be back in a minute with more from Harley Thronson about how we might afford sending humans to Mars.

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The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, and this week my guest is Harley Thronson, co-lead author of Affording Human Exploration of Mars, a document you can read online that summarizes the findings of a December workshop at George Washington University. Harley is a scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and a vice president of the American Astronautical Society. More than 50 distinguished colleagues joined him for three days of sessions that resulted in the report. Was there discussion of some of the other plans that are attracting public attention?

There are at least a couple that may have sort of questionable science and technology backgrounds, questionable science and technology backgrounds. But I'm also thinking of, for example, Mars Direct, the plan that has been pushed for decades by Bob Zubrin over at the Mars Society. Indeed. We didn't talk specifically. I wasn't in all the meetings. There were three parallel breakout sessions. We did not talk about Mars Direct so far as I know.

My personal view is that's way too much of an engineering and technological challenge and chancy to be suitable for an initial human mission to Mars. The Mars exploration program that I think that was discussed quite a bit that is getting a lot of attention is the Inspiration Mars folks, the folks who plan in seven, eight years to have a free return mission to Mars. Now, that type of mission is not the type of mission that our workshop considered. It's a one-off. It's a one-time only happy alignment between Mars and Earth. But it is exciting.

It could be a pathfinder for what we want to do two decades hence. And we are following their development, their engineering studies, their technology very closely. And, in fact, Inspiration Mars leaders were also part of our workshop. I think it will also be a new frontier in marital relations for that couple that might make that trip. I think that's a very exciting possibility. It's a challenge, but these all are. And I think the planners of that mission are hoping, as this report assumes,

that a couple of tools that are currently under development will be available at some point. We're talking about a big rocket and a capsule on top of it. Exactly. SLS and Orion. We had to make a number of assumptions in order to manage the number of topics that we were going to deal with in a single three-day workshop. The workshop primarily dealt with, as I said, just the first in the series, primarily dealt with policy, programmatics, management issues, coordination among private and government entities, international collaboration, that sort of thing, the rather top-level policy and programmatics issues. In order to deal with those and not get involved with topics further downstream,

we made some assumptions. One of them was that we accepted the high priority that NASA has placed, the very high priority that NASA has placed on completing Orion and heavy lift launch vehicle, SLS, well in advance of the time that they would be needed to go to Mars. Another very important assumption within this, it's an element that comes up over and over, is dependence on sort of a repurposing of the International Space Station. Do I have that right? I wouldn't go so far as to say repurposing, but you have it basically absolutely correct. If we're going to go to Mars in a couple of decades,

as you said, there are capabilities and technologies that need to be developed and demonstrated. The space station is our only and our best laboratory to achieve them. Life support systems, comm systems, materials, on-orbit docking, operational systems, and so on. on-orbit docking, operational systems, and so on, we will not make it to Mars in a couple of decades without extensive demonstration use of the International Space Station. Now, with its lifetime extended an additional four years, as you probably read several weeks ago, that makes the International Space Station just that much better

as a demonstration and precursor site for key capabilities necessary for long-duration spaceflight. Harley, more meetings to come. But before I let you go, I want you to talk about where this report is going. I mean, who's reading this, or who do you hope is going to be reading and learning from the conclusions reached? Well, your audience, of course, is welcome, totally welcome, and encouraged to read it. We hope they find it interesting. It has already been briefed to NASA headquarters, key folks at NASA headquarters, and that will continue. It's being briefed within the aerospace company's community. To the science community, we have already made two presentations at professional colloquia,

and colleagues have been and will be going to Capitol Hill to brief it there. How much international interest have you seen? That's just beginning. Significant. The international partners were present and, of course, very much involved in our workshop. The briefing to the coordination with the discussion with the international partners on the particular output of the workshop is just beginning. When is the second meeting? To be determined, there are two that we are in the process of pulling together.

To be determined, there are two that we are in the process of pulling together. One is the Humans to Mars conference that the Explore Mars Incorporated has scheduled for the springtime. That's on their website. Apologies, I don't know exactly the date. delve into very probably the specific scenarios, the most affordable scenarios for going to Mars within two decades will be in very late summer, early autumn. That is early days for constructing that workshop. But that will be the first. As I said, the one that we had last month was about programmatics and policy and coordination at a high level. The one later in the year is going to be getting down into the details of what scenario for going to Mars affordably and sustainably do folks want to pursue. Well, I would love to be a fly on the wall for that late summer one, and just to be part of the atmosphere of a lot of people who are working toward this wonderful goal

for all of humanity. Harley, thank you so much for telling us a little bit about the beginning of this process, and best of luck as it continues. Thank you, and you're certainly welcome. Harley Fronson is Vice President for Programs at the American Astronautical Society, the AAS. He's also a Senior Scientist for Advanced Concepts in the American Astronautical Society, the AAS. He's also a senior scientist for advanced concepts in the astrophysics science division, the Science and Exploration Directorate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,

which is where we spoke to him today. And he and Chris Carberry, the leader of Explore Mars, were the lead authors of this report, the first to emerge from the Mars Affordability Initiative. I'll be right back to talk with Bruce Betts about, and all the other stuff up there in the sky on this week's edition of What's Up in just moments. Time once again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. I am sitting in the studio at California State University, Dominguez Hills, with Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Thank you for inviting me back to your class. My pleasure. Always great to have you here, Matt.

We are live and online. If you're out there curious what scary people we look like and how it looks like when we record Planetary Radio, and we always wear ties when we record Planetary Radio, you can go to planetary.org slash Betts Class. By the way, your tie, spectacular. Thank you. Looks like the moon vomited. Tell us what to look for in the night sky. Hey, we got planets.

Mercury, it's kind of ducked away off in the, it's hanging out with the sun right now. But it'll be back. It'll be back in a week or two. The devious little thing, it left the evening sky. It'll be coming back in the pre-dawn, very low in the east. While you're out in the pre-dawn, what's really easy is Venus. Look off in the east for the super bright star-like object. Also in the pre-dawn, we've got Saturn and Mars up higher in the east and moving towards the south. In the evening sky, Jupiter is still super easy, wonderful to see, looking like a super bright star in the east in the early evening

and then high in the sky for most of the night. One thing I encourage people to do, oh, I will point out in the pre-dawn, you can get a lovely view of the moon with Venus on the 25th and 26th of February. But I encourage people, if you're looking most of the night, whether it's pre-dawn or middle of the night, not the early evening, you can actually see multiple planets up at one time. Connect the dots. Realize they're basically in a line. And that's because our solar system is most of the planets are orbiting in a very similar plane. So when they're projected on the sky, they form a line. That plane of the Earth's orbit called the ecliptic. I just love how you do all

that and keep perfect eye contact with the camera. I tried. I am getting confused where to look. I could watch all day. Oh, yeah. On to this week in space history. It was 20 years ago that Clementine entered orbit around the moon and sometimes forgotten. Lunar orbiter gave us lots of good data. Interesting cooperation between NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. And where is Clementine now? Lost and gone forever. Indeed. Smashed.

That's what I have to put up with. Two shows on Sundays, folks. Smashed. It's what I have to put up with. Two shows on Sundays, folks. All right, we move on to... Random Space Fact! We'll add the echo later. Sorry, I forgot the one microphone's attached to me. Sorry about that. Before and after imaging of craters, new craters on Mars. So there are craters happening on Mars and at a surprisingly large rate that have been observed, particularly

from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And they've taken a look at what they've seen over the last few years. And the craters of size four meters and larger, They think occurred at a rate exceeding 200 per year globally. 200 craters of 4 meters or larger. Did you just, you must have just seen this image of this 30-meter crater with this beautiful white stuff spewing out of it. Yeah, it's very cool. It's spectacular. I will be showing it in the Mars lecture here.

But, yeah, people can check it out online. That's where I found this lovely random space fact. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. I asked people, what comet did the astronauts on board the last mission to the Skylab space station, Skylab 4, what comet did they observe? Well, it's among the biggest responses we've ever gotten for a contest. And I think it's not just because people love comets, but because of what we're giving away. And it is going to go to Michelle Mallett of Vancouver, British Columbia. Chosen by Random.org, and she got the answer right, I think.

The astronomer will confirm this. It was Comet Kahootek, another major disappointment to most of us. Comet Kahootek, yeah. Kahootek? Well, I don't know. Kahootek? Isn't it? Anyway, yeah, comets are always a problem because they get built up as hey, this is going to be spectacular, but comets are so hard to predict as we find out over and over again. Michelle is going to be spectacular, but comets are so hard to predict as we find out over and over again. Michelle is going to get the ISS above, the really cool device that actually lets people know

when the International Space Station is passing over their location. It's pre-programmed by our friend, Liam Kennedy, who actually builds these things, I think, in his garage, and had a very successful Kickstarter campaign. And people can check it out. Just Google ISS above. I think it's ISS hyphen above. You'll learn more about it. And, Michelle, you will enjoy it, no doubt.

I should mention we've got a couple of other interesting ones. one from G.G. Giles, G.G. Giles in Reno, Nevada, who said that the astronomer, the discoverer of Kahootek, Kahootek, actually got to speak to the crew members from the Johnson Space Center while they were up on Skylab for observing his comet. Did you know that the German group Kraftwerk, famous for fun, fun, fun on the Autobahn, they also wrote a song about Kahootek? I did not know that. We heard that from Kevin Hecht, fun on the Audubon. They also wrote a song about Kahootek. I did not know that. We heard that from Kevin Hecht, Pleasant Plains, Illinois. Sounds like a lovely place. Doesn't it? It's very pleasant.

We're ready for another one. All right, so the trivia question for next time around. What was the brightest supernova as observed and recorded historically ever seen from Earth, and approximately, how bright was it? And how do people enter? Gosh, why don't you remember this? They go to planetary.org slash radio guest. And when do they need to have it in by? And what are they competing for this time?

First of all, they need to get it to us by not Monday, because remember, we've switched it to Tuesday now. It'll be Tuesday, the 25th of February at 2 p.m. Pacific time. So Tuesday, the 25th. And they are competing for one of those wonderful Beyond Earth posters, those letterpress posters that we've been given by our friends at Chop Shop. You can find out more at chopshopstore.com. Say that fast three times. chopshopstore.com.

See? See? Somebody's going to win it. It's going to be a great poster and we look forward to hearing from all of you. Alright everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky and think about paper clips. Thank you and good night. They hold the world together. This and duct tape of course.

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who 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 the photogenic members of the Society. Clear skies. Music Music Music Music