Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Jim Bell, The Pancam Man!

Episode Date: March 1, 2004

Planetary Radio talks with the developer of the Pancam on the Mars Exploration Rovers, Jim Bell. We also feature the last pair of Student Astronauts, and another visit with Astrobots Biff Starling and Sandy Moondust.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks to our guest, Mars has never looked better. This is Planetary Radio. Hi everyone and welcome back. I'm Matt Kaplan. What would Mars look like if you were standing on its surface? Well, we know the answer to that question for the first time, thanks to the PanCam on the Mars Exploration Rovers. We'll talk to Jim Bell, the PanCam man, on today's show. Bruce Betts returns with another trivia contest in What's Up?

And we'll relive astrobot Sandy Moondust's harrowing experience in the first ever automobile accident on Mars. Let's start by checking in with one of the last student astronauts at JPL. I'll be right back. Hi, I'm Millie. I'm from England. I'm 17 years old and I'm one of the last student astronauts. I must admit that I found the most fascinating thing to do here at JPL was actually just to watch what the scientists were doing

because they're working on the images and they're discussing. It was really nice just to see their interaction with each other and see the way they were reacting to different problems that they may have faced. We went around and we talked to them and a lot of the way they were reacting to different problems that they may have faced. We went around and we talked to them and a lot of the time they were willing to talk so some of the time they were a bit busy so we just kind of we kept in the background until they were ready and they turned around and welcomed us because I mean we didn't really want to get in their way or anything. They'd come and say oh come and sit down and tell a bit about yourself and we're just like we're trying to ask you questions. But yeah, it was much more relaxed than I thought it would be.

When I go back home, I'm going to be doing a couple of presentations at school and in class and talking to some of my friends. And my family are quite eager for me to create a web page on women working at NASA and at JPL to get people involved and get people to realize that, you know, this is an obtainable thing and that it really is an interesting thing. Mars Exploration Rover Principal Investigator Steve Squires dubbed him the Ansel Adams of Mars.

And it's no wonder. Jim Bell's pan cams are sending us images that are at least three times as sharp as any ever taken of the red planet. This astronomy professor at Cornell University is another of those rover scientists who crosses the line into engineering. We talked to him late last week during one of his shifts at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California. Jim Bell, your pan cam was billed as providing the most human view of

Mars that has ever been available. Has that been coming true? Oh my god, I think it has, Matt. I think, you know, we knew when we were putting this camera together that we would be getting more than three times the resolution of previous Mars images. We knew we'd be able to get images that covered the same colors of the spectrum that humans see in. And I think it really has lived up to its expectation. Of course, when you design an instrument, you expect it to operate as designed. expectation. Of course, when you design an instrument, you expect it to operate as designed, but it was somewhat of a pleasant surprise because we never were able to take these cameras outside in the real world on these rovers on Earth before launching them. When we started getting our first pictures back from Mars, that was the first time that they'd really been

operating in the environment that they were designed for. So, you know, you're always a little bit worried whether the instrument will work like it was designed to work in its native environment. And by golly, it actually did. Now, they were, of course, tested in clean rooms, I'm sure, over and over again. But why weren't you able to test them out and about on the desert of Earth like so many other rover components were? Well, they're very sensitive cameras, and they're designed to operate best at cold temperatures. And, of course, deserts on the Earth are very hot, and so they wouldn't work correctly at those kinds of desert temperatures. They're very special, unique instruments, and you can't just take them out into the field and get them dirty. They've lived their whole lives in clean room environments, and you can't just take them out into the field and get them dirty.

They've lived their whole lives in clean room environments, like you said, with very careful handling. And the whole rovers were that way. We never took those rovers out into dirty environments. They're as dirty as they've ever been on Mars. And so it's just sort of the special nature of instruments that are going to fly in space, that you keep them as clean as possible until they get to where they're going to be. And so in this case, we had sort of backup engineering model versions of the cameras, but they weren't exactly the same thing. And they were built out of spare parts and not giving the true fidelity of the pan cams on Mars and operating at very hot

temperatures. So we really weren't able to simulate fully what we would see when we got to Mars, and that's why it was a bit of a delightful surprise to see the actual images. You said it. The environment that they're in now is a very dirty environment. All that terrible dust, or terrible at least in terms of making devices work and continue to work. And so far, your cameras and the rest of the rovers seem to be doing much better than anybody had hoped for. That's true. And, you know, one of the landing sites, the Spirit landing site, is dustier and dirtier than the Opportunity landing site. But at both landing sites, we have dust sort of raining down at a gentle pace

out of the atmosphere onto both rovers. So everything is getting dusty over time, and we knew that would happen. But, you know, there's also a little bit of a misconception that's propagated out there about what the environment is like when you say it's dusty. You know, there's some scenes from some Hollywood Mars movies of, you know, the intrepid astronauts battling their way across the dusty plains with this 100-mile-an-hour breeze in their face. Like the Sahara, yeah. Yeah, it's nothing like Lawrence of Arabia, right? It's the dust storms on Mars and the dust deposition on Mars is a very gentle process.

You can get 50, 100-mile hour winds on Mars, but if that was blowing across you, it would be like getting pelted with feathers. There's just no momentum. Mass times velocity is very small because the atmosphere is so thin. And so it's not like the rovers are being buffeted by these fierce winds and dust particles. It's really a much more gentle environment. My guess is that most of our audience has either been to the JPL website or to your website for the science package, which is out of Cornell, of course, and we'll give that web URL before the end of this conversation.

And so they've seen pictures not only from from the Pan Cam, but from the other cameras. And these rovers are festooned with cameras. But really, the Pan Cam is, well, how would you describe how much better an image is delivered by the Pan Cam than, let's say, the so-called navigation cameras. Right. Well, the navigation cameras are very good cameras in their own right. In fact, the images that we get from the nav cams are very similar to what was returned, images that were returned from the Viking missions in the 1970s and the Mars Pathfinder

lander cameras in 1997, which are wonderful, but they are actually much lower resolution than humans who have sort of normal 20-20 vision. So I happen to be nearsighted, and if I don't wear my glasses or contact lenses, you know, I can see the world around me, but I can't resolve detail. The difference between the nav cams and the pan cams is kind of like the difference between a nearsighted person with and without their glasses. Once you put your glasses on, you can resolve all these objects that you see as rather fuzzy blobs in the world around you without your glasses. And so what pan cam has done is given us roughly a factor of three increase

in the ability to see fine detail in the rocks and the soils and the distant peaks in the sky. And it sort of elevated the standard for Mars imaging up to the same level that people have. And so I like to think of it as really accurately depicting what it would be like if you or I were standing there with our eyes and typical human vision looking around. This is what we would see. It's a much better view than what we saw from Viking and Pathfinder with those cameras. But we didn't know that ahead of time because we'd never seen the surface any better than those cameras did. They did a wonderful job given their capabilities.

So what is this wonderful new level of resolution, of acuity, telling us about Mars that we did not know? Well, it's doing a couple of things for us. I'll talk about some of the science results in a moment, but there's also sort of an operational aspect to it that we're seeing demonstrated over the past week or so on the Spirit Rover. You know, Spirit's been driving this long distance over the past week to 10 days. The pan cams have been used to allow the distance that we could drive on every day, on any given

day, to be increased by a factor of two, at least. We normally use the nav cams to make a stereo image of the drive direction and use that to build a model of how we can drive through the terrain. If we take the same image in the same direction with the pan cams, we get three times better resolution, and we can see features, obstacles, out to a much farther distance. And so that model of the drive can be built out to a much longer distance, and so we can get more meters under our belt in the drive using PanCam. That's just a pragmatic result of better resolution right there.

Was that expected, this advantage that the PanCam would provide in navigation? Absolutely. We wanted to make sure that we made a real operational contribution to this mission as well as a scientific contribution. And scientifically, one distinction is that we can see hints of possible layering or other structure in those distant hills off in the eastern direction at the Spirit Landing site that you don't get any hint of that at all from the nav cam images. landing site, that you don't get any hint of that at all from the nav cam images.

And seeing that kind of evidence that those may be, you know, those may have some stratigraphy in them is helping guide this decision to eventually head over there. At places like the Opportunity site, where we can see these spherical particles that some people on the team are calling blueberries, We're able to map their distribution all around the lander and figure out where to put the microscope down to try to get some of these beautiful images of those that people have been seeing. And eventually we're going to want to try to get some of the chemical analysis instruments onto them. So we're trying to find the largest concentrations of them. And we need PanCam's resolution to see them because they're so tiny.

They're only a few millimeters across, and we can't see those kinds of scale of features in the NavCan images, but we can see them in PanCam. We're talking with Jim Bell of the Astronomy Department at Cornell University, known as the home of Carl Sagan years ago, which is not an insignificant fact or a coincidence. He is also the lead for the PANCAM, part of the Athena Science Payload on the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Jim, you said you could talk a little bit about those science results that are beginning to come in from the rovers. Right. We're obviously exploring two very different landing sites, and that is what we'd hoped for from orbit when we tried to decide on where to look for from orbit. We were hoping to be looking at two different kinds of places where we could study both geology and composition and learn something about the past history of water on Mars.

And it's been a challenge trying to keep up with the results coming in from each rover half a planet apart. One could stay up 24 hours and 39 minutes and still not follow at all. But what we're seeing at the Spirit landing site, of course, we were going in with the hypothesis that we may have landed in an ancient lake bed. And primarily what we're seeing from the PanCam and other instruments so far in our travels around the landing site is lots of evidence for what are most likely volcanic rocks, maybe ejected from nearby craters, maybe emplaced sometime over the past billion years by some of the volcanoes that are in the area not far from

this crater. We're trying to follow a trail right now of rocks that are leading up to a crater still about 70 or so meters away from the rover. What we're seeing right at the lander and around the landing site is this uppermost layer of probably mostly volcanic rocks. And we're hoping that by getting close to this crater, this big hole in the ground, we'll see some evidence of what lies underneath that. Maybe this crater has dug up hole in the ground, we'll see some evidence of what lies underneath that. Maybe this crater has dug up some different kinds of deposits, some different kinds of rocks, and maybe we'll learn something about the possible action of water or stratigraphy in this area. And then the thinking is that we'll either go down into that crater if we see some kinds of outcrops

or some evidence of sedimentary rocks, or continue on towards those hills off to the east that I mentioned earlier, that may also have some evidence of layering or at least stratigraphy of some kind in them that could tell us more about this putative ancient lake bed environment. But we certainly haven't found any sort of smoking gun that points to it, this is what the history of this particular landing site is. But then again, we're still relatively early in this geologic investigation. And like any good field geologist, we need to poke around a lot more. Now at the Opportunity site, the story is a little bit different because we got very, very fortunate to land

both in this tiny little hole in the ground, which is only the size of a basketball court. Our world is very small in this little hole. But in that hole with us is this wonderful outcrop that many people have seen pictures of that shows evidence of layering and very, very fine-scale laminations, which to a geologist mean that there's been some changing process over time involving either wind or water or volcanism. We're still not sure. We've got little pieces of evidence pointing in different directions. And so we're right in the middle right now of exploring this outcrop in detail, making elemental composition measurements,

making pan cam color measurements to look at the composition, looking at it with the other instruments. And we don't have a good coherent story on that yet, but we're right in the middle of it. And it's just very, very lucky that we found this little outcrop where we were. Now, the idea is to continue to explore that area, hammer it with all the instruments we can, dig some holes in it with the rat, eventually come out of this crater and look at the surrounding

plains and try to put this little micro environment that we've been in for the past 30 sols into a broader context geologically. Are we in a typical in for the past 30 sols into a broader context geologically are we in a typical area for the landing site are there more of these outcrops all around you know what's the what's the geologic environment this is a terrible thing to ask a scientist uh but but i will ask anyway all right uh do you have some hope that uh on the strength of evidence that may be uncovered by both of these rovers, that you may be able to come up with some conclusive answers, for example, about the Meridiani site where Opportunity is now rolling around,

that you might be able to find enough evidence to point what has happened there toward one of those causative agents. You mentioned water, wind, or volcanism. I imagine people would be most excited if it turned out to be water. Sure. Actually, I'm very confident that we will be able to narrow those possibilities significantly. One of the reasons why we're there is because we put together a payload of the right kinds of instruments to answer these kinds of questions. We need a little bit of luck.

We've already gotten a little bit of luck because we landed next to an interesting outcrop. We need to survive longer in this environment because it takes time to make these kinds of observations. They typically are not, even in geologic field work on the Earth, they're typically not these eureka moments where you make one measurement that gives everything away. I mean, it's a story that's preserved in the rocks, that's been lithified into the geology, and our job is to try to pick that story out piece by piece,

pebble by pebble, measurement by measurement, and put it back together. Geologists on earth spend weeks and weeks out in the field, and then they spend months and months pouring over the data back in their laboratories and offices. And that's the way we're operating. The nice thing about this is that, you know, we've got so many people following along with us. We're putting the images out there in real time. And we're sitting around here at JPL around a table looking at these

beautiful pictures, and people are scratching their heads and throwing ideas out, and somewhere out there in Iowa, there's a fourth grade class, and their teachers are sitting out there scratching their heads and trying to figure it all out, and when we're all doing that together, and I think that gives people a real sense of how science is done. Very exciting, and I wish we had more time, but that's a good place probably for us to finish up. We did say that we would give you a chance to provide the website at Cornell where people might look into your own campus' coverage of what's happening with these rovers and the Athena package and the PanCam.

What is that web address? Sure. It's http://athena.cornell.edu. And, of course, there's the marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov website, and they have a lot of coverage. And the coverage at Cornell augments that very nicely by describing the instruments in more detail and some of the individual stories from people on the science team. Jim Bell, we know that you're on duty. Are you on Mars time, by the way?

I am. Which side? I am on the Mer-B, Meridiani Mars time, and it's about 2.30 in the afternoon, and we're just about to receive a bunch of data down from the Odyssey Pass this afternoon. Well, enjoy the rest of the afternoon, and I hope you get some more of that oodles of data that have been coming in from both of these rovers on the surface of Mars. Thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio.

Thanks for having me, Matt. And we'll be back with Bruce Betts right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars.

We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS.

That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, PlanetarySociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Bruce Betts is here with What's Up. We have very little time for What's Up this evening because it is such a packed Planetary Radio tonight. Bruce, what's up? Planets, Matt.

Planets are up. There are four planets out there in the evening sky going from west to east. You can see Venus extremely bright. Mars up above that, less bright. Saturn past that. And then Jupiter over in the east. You'll see Jupiter near the full moon on March 5th and 6th. On to this week in space history.

March 5th, 1979, that's 25 years ago, Matt, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter. And still going. Unbelievable set of encounters. It sure is, in fact, random space fact. Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from the Earth. Golly goshness, 25 years ago. It is incredible. Wow.

Just that it's still working. If only they made cars like that. Without even a tuna. Right, that's right. It has been in the shop in all that time. 100 billion miles before your first tuna. What do we go to now? Is it trivia time?

Okay. that time. Yeah, 100 billion miles before your first tune-up. What do we go to now? Is it trivia time? It's a little contest. Last week we asked you what technique was used to image the surface of Venus with Magellan Mapper, and also it's used to various Earth missions to look at Earth. SAR. What does SAR stand

for? That's this technique. You want to know how we did, I bet. Oh, sure. I don't know who won. Well, we got, I hate to use technical terms. We got a ton of entries this time. Our winner is somebody who may have heard us on Mighty KUCI, the radio station at UC Irvine, because he is Kevin Balch.

Kevin Balch of Irvine, California. Let us know that SAR stands for Synthetic Aperture Radar. Congratulations, Kevin. Nice job. Indeed, Synthetic Aperture Radar. Radar technique used to image a surface and also used in the case of anus to see through the clouds and massive atmosphere.

Here's for this week, in honor of Voyager's 25th anniversary, flying by Jupiter. Who is the project scientist for Voyager? The Voyager mission? Project scientist for Voyager's 25th anniversary flying by Jupiter. Who is the project scientist for Voyager, the Voyager mission? Project scientist for Voyager. Go to planetary.org slash radio and give us your answer. I want to make one quick note, Matt. We have something new.

We're just debuting on our website, which is our Earth dial project. We've invited people to build Earth dials to sort of match the Mars dials on the rovers. people to build Earth dials to sort of match the Mars dials on the rovers. You can find images of Earth dials around the world starting now on our website. Go to planetary.org. And thank you, everybody. We hope I was zippy enough for you, Matt. How was that? Sure.

You were so fast, we can take another couple of seconds to mention that your friends, Biff and Sandy, are coming up right after we hear from another student astronaut. Excellent. That's worth going quickly for. So we will. Bruce? Excellent. Look up in the night sky and ponder why you don't see much in the white shadows at night. Thank you, and good night. Bruce Betts is here each week with What's Up, a regular feature of Planetary Radio. And we will be right back, as we said, right after this, from our friend Nomatemba, a student

astronaut from South Africa. My name is Nomatemba Kondjo, and I'm from South Africa. I am 15 years old. I'm one of the last student astronauts to come here to NASA. Well, since we've been attending the meetings and meeting the scientists, asking them questions, that has been really a great thing to do. And also, ColourPixie and the images, working with the images. And also, we're making the Mazda movies.

This is quite a great experience for me because from South Africa, I've never been exposed to space explorations before. And now coming here, this is a really big thing. And I feel like I'm going to go back to south africa tell them what i've been doing and i've got a couple of translations to do and to encourage them as well that if they want to do something they can do it but as long as they put effort to it and for as long as you can commit you can do it women in south africa mostly like everywhere, like in Africa, what you do is housewives, they were supposed to sit in the house, cook and grow kids. This has to put an end, we have to put an end to it because whoever you are,

if you're a woman or a man, if you've got a chin, it's time for women to pick up, to pull up their socks, do whatever they want to do. It's a free country, I. It's a free country. I mean, it's a free world. Well, that was very exciting for me, even when the president went to see me at school, because most of my friends do, like, accounting and business and these sort of things.

And now they're starting to gain interest in science, which is what I would love to do, even when I come back, to them how much fun I've been having, what I've been doing and she looked like a great experience for me. Okay, as promised, we are back once again

with a little bit of time here to play back some more conversation between Biff and Sandy and their experiences on Mars. And we're going to pick up with Sandy having landed on Mars and something that turned into a rather scary moment. In the following conversation, it's right after Astro Bot Ground Control realized that Sandy was still in sleep mode on the DVD

and was just about to get driven over by the Opportunity Rover as it came straight off the lander. Now Biff, in a rare show of chivalry, is heard first. Sleeping Beauty! Wakey, wakey time! Or else, squishy, squishy time! Citizens coming back online.

What is that noise? And then it's Shadow. Ah! Dudette, peel yourself up and off of there. Serious Rover wheels coming your way. Wheel? Ow! Wheel?

Ow! Wheel? Ow! That's gotta hurt. You okay, Sandy? Doing a systems check All okay That was a somewhat unpleasant experience DVD with four million names seems okay

Oh yeah, do that In the pictures we can hardly tell You just got run over by three metal wheels Dig the track marks in the soil It'll lead right back to you. Did you get the license plate? Lucky for you that Martian gravity is only 38% of Earth gravity, so the rover only weighed 38% as much as on Earth.

I think I'll reboot. I feel a little woozy. Okay, shortly after that harrowing experience Sandy had, being run over by a rover, I had this direct conversation with her and with Biff. Now, remember we've cut out the long delays due to the delay in the radio signals going back and forth between Earth and Mars. Sandy, how are you doing after that terrible accident? I'm doing wonderfully. I've just been taking some time to appreciate all the beauty here and have a little fun. Whoa, okay.

Who are you and what have you done with Sandy? It is I, Biff. No, I'm Biff. No, no, it is I, Sandy, Biff. I am Sandy. You're appreciating beauty and having fun? Why, yes, Biff. I hope you are, too.

Life, albeit a robotic one, is precious. We must take the time to smell the hematite. Oh, listen, I'm glad you brought that up. Speaking of hematite, we now have images showing surface hematite concentrations at the Opportunity Landing Site. They are from the mini-tests, the mini-thermal emission spectrometer. Wow, the colors in the images are really pretty. I know it's false color, but don't you like the patterns? Whoa, you like the pretty colors?

You're not telling us about how, on Earth, coarse-grained hematite usually forms in liquid water? Or how this confirms the hematite measurements taken from orbit that caused this site to be selected? No discussion of the possible scientific and astrobiological significance? Dudette, you are freaking me out! What happened when you got run over? Biff, all that you said about the science is true. And I still appreciate that in its own beautiful way. But we've discussed the scientific significance

before, and I've seen the world in a broader perspective now. Pretty colors are pretty colors, and should be appreciated in their own right. Okay. Has anyone else seriously weirded it out about now? Well, do that. Have fun enjoying the beauty.

My head hurts. We'll try to bring you more from Biff and Sandy very soon, and we'll definitely be back next week with more Planetary Radio. I hope you'll join us.