Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - It's Mars Rover Opportunity, Only Smarter

Episode Date: April 12, 2010

JPL engineer Daniel Gaines helped develop new software for Opportunity to autonomously select objects for close-up imaging as she races across Mars. Emily Lakdawalla is thrilled by evidence of recently active volcanos on Venus. Bill Nye salutes three decades of service by retiring Planetary Society founder Lou Friedman.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How to Make a Mars Rover Smarter, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity may be showing her age after six years on the red planet, but she's sharper than ever. We'll talk with JPL's Daniel Gaines about Opportunity's new decision-making capability. Are there active volcanoes on Venus? New evidence says yes, according to Emily Lakdawalla. Bill Nye the Science and Planetary Guy salutes 30 years of Planetary Society leadership by Lou Friedman. And Bruce Betts will

help me celebrate Yuri's night with a new space trivia contest. As we put together this week's show, STS-131 astronauts had just completed a second spacewalk, installing a new ammonia tank on the exterior of the International Space Station. A stuck bolt caused some delay, but the time will be made up on the third and last EVA of the mission. While Space Shuttle Discovery circled the planet, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden unveiled new program assignments for the agency's ten centers.

The goals fit within the budget recently proposed by the Obama administration. The next shuttle mission is barely a month away. The scheduled May 14 launch is the last scheduled for Atlantis before it is retired. Here's a program note. We still have plenty of room for you at Planetary Radio Live. Reserve your free seat in Pasadena for the April 30 event by searching for Planetary Radio at brownpapertickets.com. We've got a link and more information at planetary.org slash radio.

Time to talk with Emily Lakdawalla about her favorite Planetary Society blog entries over the last few days. Emily, some pretty pictures this week, but let's talk about a story that I know is very close to your heart. That is this very long piece that you posted about news from Venus Express. Well, it's not hard to summarize the news. The news is that it seems that Venus Express has really found evidence that there has been very recent volcanism on Venus. It didn't catch a volcano exploding in the act like we have with Io, but this is really very strong evidence that there

was a recent volcanic flow that hasn't had a chance to weather yet. And consequently, you know, we can add, probably add Venus to the list of planets that have active volcanism. What is the actual evidence that this orbiter found? Well, it's buried in something called the emissivity of the surface. The instrument that gathered this data is called VERDIS. It's on Venus Express. It's an imaging spectrometer.

It takes photos of the planet in wavelengths longer than the human eye can see. And in the particular wavelength it was looking at, which is one micron, it's the very near infrared, not much longer than red wavelength, Venus is actually glowing with heat because Venus is a very hot place. But it's actually not the thermal glow from the flows that it was detecting. They actually

had to correct out for the effects of temperature on emissivity. And once they've corrected out for temperature, they find places that have high emissivity are places with minerals like pyroxene and olivine, fresh volcanic minerals. Places with low emissivity are weathered places, places where those minerals have reacted with the highly corrosive atmosphere to turn into other minerals. And so they find these high emissivity places are associated with huge volcanoes with relatively recent looking flows. So they're pretty certain that these are very recent volcanism on Venus. Sounded like you're much more convinced than you used to be, too. Yeah, you know, I'm always very skeptical of results that come from spacecraft that are trying to peer optically through thick atmospheres. It's the same skepticism I have

toward results on Titan. But this one, the work was very careful. It's not just this one piece of data from the emissivity. It's emissivity plus all of the careful stratigraphic geologic mapping that's been done on Venus in the past. And so I think they put together a fairly convincing data from the emissivity. It's emissivity plus all of the careful stratigraphic geologic mapping that's been done on Venus in the past. And so I think they put together a fairly convincing case. However, it would still be nice to actually see a volcano blowing up. That would be the literal smoking gun. Yes, literally. That's great. Let's move out to Saturn, where you posted a beautiful picture. Yeah, Cassini just produces the most amazing photos. It's really not fair because I think, you know, Saturn has got to be one of the most beautiful places in the solar system. So Cassini, they don't have to work very hard to make gorgeous photos.

And I put one together this week that included one of the big icy moons, Rhea. It included the rings and it included two of the small potato-shaped moons, Prometheus and Janus. And Cassini is getting these kinds of shots a lot because it's orbiting in the ring plane. And so it kind of collapses all of the moons and rings into one line across the sky. And it's very easy to catch them all in the same frame. And maybe just one more thing to mention, not so much a photograph as a photographer. So that's right, Matt. There's a Japanese astronaut on the International Space Station who is just an amazing photographer. And of course, he has a great place to take photos from through the portholes of the space station. He shot photos of aurorae over Earth, spacecraft arriving, and all kinds of exciting things.

And you can subscribe to his Twitter feed and just see him tweet all these amazing photos from space. Thanks again, Emily. Oh, by the way, thanks for the plug for our April 30th Planetary Radio Live as well. That's right. I'm looking forward to that, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. She joins us every week for a review of her recent blog entries. We move on to Opportunity, crawling around up there on Mars with new and more intelligent software, right after we hear from Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here,

vice president of the Planetary Society. And this week, I want everyone to take a second and realize that Lou Friedman, the executive director of the Planetary Society for the last 30 years, is going to be stepping down. He's going to retire. Now, if you know Lou, he's not really going to retire. He's going to be buzzing around the office the whole time, giving everybody advice, directing things. But nevertheless, this is an end of an era. Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, former head of the Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL, and Lou Friedman started the Planetary Society in the winter of 1979-1980. And Lou, the last of the three founders, is going to step aside. So the position's open, everybody.

If you want to be executive director of the Planetary Society, come on down. But just think about this. These guys started this thing at a time in history when everybody was sure that there was still tremendous interest in space exploration, but the United States government and NASA, before the European Space Agency was any big deal, these guys realized that although public interest was still strong, government interest was waning.

So we really are at kind of the same point in history. People are still very excited about space exploration. People still want to know what's going on on Mars. They want to find out about the new discoveries of many, many more distant galaxies. And yet NASA is kind of stuck in low Earth orbit, retiring the space shuttle program, canceling the constellation program. What are we going to do? Well, the Planetary Society is going to lead the way again. The Planetary Society is going to bring everybody together again so that we can maintain worldwide

interest in space exploration and explore those two fundamental ideas that we all are driven by. Are we alone? Where did we come from? How do we go about finding out? This is still the world's largest space interest organization that is independent of any government or any corporation. And you, as a listener, are probably part of it. So we very much appreciate that. Let's work together to change the world. I get to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy.

Let's see a show of hands. How many of you have upgraded your computer's software in the last six years? All of you, right? Spacecraft around our solar system also get upgrades. It was Opportunity's turn a few weeks ago. solar system also get upgrades. It was Opportunity's turn a few weeks ago. As the Mars Exploration rover continued her long sojourn across Meridiani Planum toward a crater called Endeavor, mission engineers carefully uploaded a new system called AEGIS. That's A-E-G-I-S, or Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science. Daniel Gaines helped develop the software at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California.

Dan was a mission manager for the rovers until recently. Now he's on the software development team for the Mars Science Laboratory, the much larger, much more sophisticated rover NASA hopes to launch toward the Red Planet in the fall of 2011. Daniel joined me via Skype a few days ago. Dan, it is always a pleasure and an honor to talk to folks who've been part of the Mars Exploration Rover team, even though you just told me that you've moved on to the Mars Science Laboratory.

We'll get to that a little bit later. But we're here to talk about this new software that is being tested out on Opportunity. Here's kind of a dumb question. How much smarter is Opportunity now than it was, than she was before the upload? Well, it's a little hard to quantify. But basically what the software provides is the ability for scientists to acquire images that they wouldn't otherwise have the ability to collect. scientists to acquire images that they wouldn't otherwise have the ability to collect. Sort of as a typical scenario, the roval will drive off somewhere, and then at the end of the drive,

it'll take some images, panoramic images of the area with a wide-angle camera, and then downlink those. And then the scientists begin their day by looking in those images to see if there's any observations they want to make with a higher fidelity or a higher resolution camera with a narrower angle that you can get sort of closer in images with multiple filters so you get some nice color images and if so then they create what are called targeted observations where they pick and pick those out in the images the navigation images that they downlinked and follow those up with those panoramic higher quality images. The problem is, once the rover is finished to drive, there's sometimes time at the end of the day, before the day is done, that it could take some additional data, but we don't know exactly where the rover is at that point,

so we can't create these targeted images. The ability that Aegis software provides is it can actually look for those targets for the scientists. So the scientists can describe the kinds of things they're interested in, whether they're interested in darker rocks or lighter rocks or rounder rocks or angular rocks. And then the Aegis software can look around to see if there's a rock that, a target that satisfies, that looks, you know, that matches that criteria. And if so, it can actually take the targeted images that the scientist wouldn't otherwise be able to collect. So this is largely a productivity tool, I guess you could call it, because Opportunity does some of the work that used to have to

take place here on Earth. That's right. That's right. Is this also useful because Opportunity is on a roll, is on this long trek? In fact, yes, it is. So Opportunity, as you guys may know, is on its way to the Endeavor crater. And so the major goal for each day is drive as much as you can. And so if we took time out of the beginning of the day to take these additional images, if the scientists see some interesting cobble out there that they'd like to get some panoramic data on, if they took that time out of the beginning of the plan, then it would take time away from the drive. However, there are, especially over the weekends these days, where we'll plan multiple days so that we don't have to be here all over the

weekend. Usually we'll drive on either the first or second day. And then there's a third day, the rover would just be resting, charging its batteries and taking a little bit of observations. And normally those would be untargeted. But in this way, we can actually follow up with some targeted observations. So the scientists can get the panoramic data that they wanted, but not slow down the drive. And so we can still make good progress towards endeavor. Wow. That does sound extremely useful. If Opportunity returned an image of some object that it had chosen on its own, and that object was just so cool, would the scientists be able to tell everybody, hey, let's backtrack. This is worthwhile. Yes, that's correct.

In fact, you wouldn't necessarily have to backtrack at that point because typically what Aegis would run on the images that were collected at the end of the drive. And so the scientists would come in today expecting to schedule another drive. They could look at the data that Aegis had already collected and say, oh, that looks interesting enough based on what's been collected that we should go over there and use the spectrometer on it or a close-up observation. Yeah. And that's right. It can provide that information ahead of time to help them make that decision. How is the software working so far?

In the press release that I read, it talked about one already, I guess, at least tentative success. Yes. So what was described in the press release was the completion of our technology checkout. So when a new technology gets introduced on the vehicle, we go through some stages to make sure it's working properly before we sort of release it to the full team and make use of all of its features. And that was completed. So that press release represented the completion of our full checkout. The images that it took was, the criteria that it used, I should say, to take the images was developed by the technology team, myself and my partners.

So it had not yet been deployed by a science team. It was just basically demonstrated that it was ready for the science team. And so just this past Friday, the science team made their first use of it. This past Friday, the science team made their first use of it, and it's going to be running again for the first time, requested by the science team, later today on Mars. There have to be people, at least on the science team, who, when you guys on the engineering side say, hey, we've got some cool new software to upload, they're going to be a little bit nervous, even if you've tested this endlessly in the Mars yard? nervous, even if you've tested this endlessly in the Mars yard? That's right. Yeah. I mean, we've tested in a variety of situations, including the very high-fidelity test bed we have here that basically is a mock-up of or a copy of the MER rovers.

But certainly, in fact, and we have a MER scientist on our development team who guides us and helps us. And we've actually had several meetings throughout the development of this with people from the science team so that we, you know, we want to make sure it could be useful for the scientists because they're an integral part of this. Opportunity is not just blindly doing this on its own. It actually is taking input from the scientists of what would be a useful observation and uses that to guide its selection.

So we, most of the, a lot of the scientists, this wasn't a surprise to them because we already worked with them at this point. However, we did have even recently a meeting just to introduce them again to the topic to let them know it was available. And in fact, there was actually the majority is a lot of interest and excitement about this new capability because, you know, they see that it can give them some options that they didn't already have a toolbox, you know, a new tool for their toolbox that they can use. you have a toolbox, you know, a new tool for their toolbox that they can use. So they're very excited at this point to sort of try it out and experiment with it and see what it can do to see how it can possibly fit into their future operations. That's Daniel Gaines, Mars rover engineer at JPL. He'll tell us more about Opportunity's new, brainier software in a minute.

This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Radio. passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website,

planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Engineers on the Mars Exploration Rover mission couldn't install a bigger brain in Opportunity, so they gave her the ability to do more with the brain she's got. Daniel Gaines is one of the Jet Propulsion Lab software developers who created Aegis, autonomous exploration for gathering increased science. The new code enables the rover to select objects to image with only general guidance from scientists on Earth.

Here's something that never occurred to me until I read about this software upgrade. I never thought to ask anyone, how smart is the hardware on Spirit and Opportunity? I mean, are we talking about something at the level of, I don't know, a desktop PC of six years ago since that's when the launches took place? I mean, we tend to forget that they've been crawling around up there this long. That's right. And so, in fact, the power of the hardware is even less powerful

than what you would have had on a typical desktop six years ago. And the reason is because the hardware has to be radiation hardened. The surface of Mars isn't protected as much from radiation as Earth is. And so the power of the hardware for space applications tends to lag quite a bit behind a typical desktop. So six years ago, a typical desktop would have been, man, it's hard to remember, but at least a couple gigahertz or at least 1.5 gigahertz,

whereas Opportunity has about a 20 megahertz processor. So it's much slower, and it's a major challenge trying to do more complicated things on that processor. That's fascinating, thinking that we're now, of course, dealing with PCs, cheap PCs that are 1 and 2 gigahertz. That's right, right. At clock speed. It's incredible that you're able to get this kind of artificial intelligence,

I think, out of that sort of hardware. Yeah, yeah. We're often amazed ourselves. One of the most important things about this, I guess, is in addition to whatever additional science it allows opportunity to do, is what it means for the future. This must have a lot to do with the fact that you've switched over from being a merperson to the next step up, Mars Science Laboratory. That's right. We're certainly working on getting this technology incorporated into future missions such as the Mars Science Laboratory. In fact, MSL has a really very exciting instrument called the ChemCam, which is basically a combination of

a laser and a spectrometer. Oh, I've heard. yeah, I've read about this. Yeah, and it fires a laser at the target, and that causes a plasma to get generated, which is then analyzed with a spectrometer to give you a lot of information about the composition of the target. Clearly, this is a target that you really have to correctly target if you want to, or an instrument that you need to precisely target if you want to hit your object. And so, again, post-drive, this would be a great opportunity for Aegis to help pick out and shoot a couple chem-cam targets so that then the next day when the scientists come in, they can be armed with additional information about what they want to do that day because they'll already have some interesting information about the material

or the area that they're currently in. But you're not absolutely committed to building this kind of capability into MSL yet? That's part of the testing? Our team is certainly ready to do it. We're working with MSL, the team, the project, to see if it can get incorporated. The principal investigator for ChemCam is very excited about the technology and has some interest in seeing it made available. And so we're working from there, and we'll hopefully make some progress on that front. Yeah. How are things going?

I mean, the good news that we carried just last week on this show was that it looks like MSL is going to get that really terrific camera rather than sort of the cheaper version. You know what? You may know I've had my head buried in the flight software. I'm on the flight software team, and I've sort of just been chugging away uh making our releases yeah the the story that emily lactowala are my colleague shared with us was that it looks like they're going to try and get the uh the good mast cam the stereo mast cam right back up which i imagine would also be good for uh for your software right yeah the the better better quality of images we have to work with, the better decisions the software can make, absolutely.

What does this say overall for sort of the future of probes, not just ones that are going to crawl around on a planet, but that we're sending to the outer solar system and elsewhere, for their ability to act autonomously? I think it's promising. And I think what we've always tried to do with our work is make sure that we're not excluding the science input. I mean, we're not yet able to make a piece of software that can perform as well as a real scientist or geologist. We can't replace them.

And so we try to find ways to make use of their input. And so this is a demonstration of both performing some autonomy, taking additional observations on its own, but also basing that decision on scientist input along the way. How long have you been there at JPL? It's about nine years now. And pretty much with Mars Exploration Rover up until you joined the MSL team? Well, when I first started, so I worked with the artificial intelligence group at JPL, and I was pretty much exclusively doing research work for the first four years while I was here. And then I switched on to half-time working on the operations team on the MER rovers, just so I could get a better idea of, you know, if I'm trying to make software to help out missions, I'd really

like to make sure I know what the missions really need. And so it's definitely been eye-opening, and I've learned a great deal and really had a great time on the MER rovers. And then, yeah, then recently I moved to the Mars Science Laboratory project because I wanted to learn more about the development of flight software at lower levels. And this has also been a fantastic learning experience as well. Yeah, and with any luck, go back to Mars as part of the team with an amazing rover. That's right. We're about out of time. Dan, thanks so much for joining us.

As I said, it is always a pleasure to talk to you folks who are helping us to learn so much more about the Red Planet in an up-close-and-personal way. Oh, thank you. It was my pleasure, too. Daniel Gaines is a former mission manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers. He's switched over now to the software development team for the Mars Exploration Rovers. He's switched over now to the software development team for the Mars Science Laboratory, that next step up, that next generation rover that will be launched for the Red Planet before long. And we'll launch ourselves into this week's edition

of What's Up with Bruce Betts in just a few moments. Stay with us. Bruce Betts is on the Skype connection. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and we welcome you back. Hi. Hi. Hi. You're all better, I can tell.

You're really at full energy now. I am. I'm a full energy, healthy guy again. That's good. I'm glad to hear it, and I hope to see you in person next time around. Tell us, what's up? Well, it's just a planet festival out there. Check out Venus in the evening sky, low in the west, bright star-like object, can't miss it, look a little while after sunset. You can also still probably catch Mercury

low down, low to Venus's right, still looking like a bright star, but not nearly as bright as Venus. And Mars is high overhead in the southeast, looking kind of reddish, continuing to fade. is high overhead in the southeast, looking kind of reddish, continuing to fade. Saturn is over towards the east in the early evening, looking yellowish. And in the pre-dawn, for those disposed to the pre-dawn, you can't miss Jupiter these days, super bright, low in the east, and rising higher and higher as the weeks go on. That, I think, takes us through the planetary sky anyway.

Let us go on to this week in space history. Of course, a big week in human spaceflight this week. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space. 20 years later, in 1981, on the same day, STS-1 Columbia launched the very first space shuttle. Wow, and I would have totally missed Yuri's Night, which is still going strong ever since that first one that they held on the 40th anniversary back in 2001. I believe there are still some big parties this week. Anyway, happy Yuri's Night, everybody, and to you too, Bruce. Thanks. I also want to mention in 1972,

Apollo 16 launched, headed off to the moon this week. And then we move on to Random Space Fact! Oh, jeez. It started out just as kind of a frequency sweep, but it got kind of scary there at the end. My pleasure. Yeah, dogs looked up and gave me a funny one.

So talking about Yuri Gagarin's mission, it was Vostok 1. It had a mission duration of an hour and 48 minutes, an apogee of 327 kilometers, That's an apogee of 327 kilometers, a perigee of 169 kilometers, and basically did roughly one orbit before returning him back to Earth. Great start, though, for humankind's first venture into space, unless you count X-15s, I guess. And now we move on to the trivia contest,

and we asked you, by mass, how many Saturns go into the sun? How many Saturnian masses would make up the sun's mass? It's an amazingly large number. How'd we do, Matt? People did remarkably well with this. I mean, there's some great sources of information out there. Some people derived it, not surprisingly, Lindsay Dawson. But others let us know that they used that great search engine called From Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha, which if you've never played with it, try that out. It is quite incredible, especially for a scientifical type questions like this. The best answer we got, I got to tell you, came from Kevin Hecht. He's not the winner. Sorry, Kevin. But he said, you know, you were talking about planet Saturn, right? Not Saturn cars? Because his guess was that probably you could get roughly 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd Saturn cars into the mass of the sun. And that is, wait for it, that's a mole lot of Saturns.

That is a mole lot of Saturns. It's a real winner that you want to hear, though, isn't it? Phil Haddock. Phil out of New Mexico. La Luz? La Luz? New Mexico? Anyway, it's been about a year and a half since Phil won the contest, but that long dry spell is over. 3,491 Saturn masses to make one solar mass. Now, there's a little bit of a range there.

Roughly 3,489 to, we would have gone as high as 3,500. But, hey, close enough. So, Phil, we're sending you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Well, congratulations out in La Luz. Wow, yeah, Saturn cars. Never would have expected it.

I got to be more specific. And who knew the power of Avogadro's number? Not me. I'm allergic to Avogadro's. I find them tasty, especially with some salsa. Anyhoo, let's go on to the next trivia contest. And just to finish out the theme, Give him some salsa. Anyhoo, let's go on to the next trivia contest. And just to finish out the theme, how old was Yuri Gagarin when he made his spaceflight?

That first spaceflight of a human. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And you have until the 19th of April, 2010, the 19th at 2 p.m. Pacific time, to get us your answer. Okay. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about floating through the sky on a gondola like you're going through the canals. Okay, thank you, and good night.

Grazie. My friend Bruce is the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова