Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Life on Mars: Joining the Quest with Penny Boston and Jim Green

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

Mat Kaplan recently hosted the first of a series of Explore Mars live and interactive events. NASA astrobiologist Penelope Boston and NASA Chief Scientist James Green joined him for a thrilling conversation about the search for life on the Red Planet, and what may happen if or when we find it. The comet may be a bust, but Bruce Betts tells us there’s still plenty to see in the current night sky. Mat and Bruce also talk about the first ever What’s Up Live! See the live Mars discussion and explore our other topics at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0429-2020-life-on-mars-penny-boston-jim-green.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We found life on Mars. Now what? This week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Hoping you and yours are staying well. No, you didn't miss the biggest headline of the century. Finding life on Mars is still just the goal and dream of millions, including our two great guests. Penelope Boston is a world-renowned astrobiologist and would-be Martian. James Green is chief scientist at NASA. They recently joined me for a live conversation sponsored by Explore Mars, and you'll hear most of it in minutes.

Then we'll drop in or drop up for a visit with another chief scientist, our own Bruce Betts. Here's a reminder that you'll be able to join Bruce and me for the first What's Up Live on Thursday, April 30th. More information and a player are at planetary.org slash live. Here we go. Here we go. NASA and SpaceX have set the 27th of May as the launch date for SpaceX's Crew Dragon to carry astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station. The milestone launch will be the first carrying humans from Florida since the end of the space shuttle program nine years ago. Planetary Radio and Planetary.org will provide coverage leading up to this big event.

That's just one of the stories you'll find in this week's downlink from the Planetary Society. Here's more. NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft completed a sample collection rehearsal at asteroid Bennu, coming within 75 meters of the surface before backing away, as planned. The probe is scheduled to actually touch down in August when it will grab a small sample of regolith for return to Earth in 2023. Japan's Hayabusa 2, now on its way home from asteroid Ryugu, arrives late this year. And CHEOPS, the European Space Agency's characterizing exoplanet satellite, has observed its first distant world.

The target was a puffy, gaseous planet 30% larger than Jupiter that is orbiting a star 320 light-years from us. CHEOPS is designed to precisely measure the diameters of known exoplanets, which will also reveal more about their compositions. You can get more at planetary.org slash downlink, including a free subscription to the weekly newsletter.

The Planetary Society isn't the only space organization that has turned to the web as an alternative to in-person events during these crazy times. Our sister organization, Explore Mars, has also begun an ambitious series of live, interactive discussions. It was my honor to host the first of these for them on April 1st. The topic was Life on Mars, Implications and Impacts. Penny Boston, Jim Green, and I talked about the status of the search for life on the red planet, what form that life might take, where we may find it,

and perhaps most dramatically, what may happen when we discover we are not alone. We've got a link to the complete video on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio, including the great slides Penny and Jim presented and the audience Q&A segment that I've omitted here to save time. The audio quality of what you're about to enjoy is not up to our usual standard, but I think you'll find the conversation as fascinating as I did. Let me set the stage for today's conversation with a hypothetical. We've jumped forward to 2024.

A rover named Perseverance that we'll be talking more about momentarily has been rolling across Mars for three years. Another visitor from Earth, a more recent arrival named Rosalind Franklin, has been pulling up samples from below the surface of Mars. and the European Space Agency have just announced a joint press conference that is going to reveal images and other data indicating that we just may have found strong evidence of life. Will this news, as my boss Bill Nye likes to say, change everything? What do we do next, and how will it affect plans to send men and women to Mars? But I'm getting ahead of myself. So hold that thought for now as we meet two very distinguished guests that will be joining me

here. I really can't think of anyone else I would rather have on board to talk about this topic, beginning with Dr. Penelope Boston. She is the Senior Advisor for Science Integration at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Penny's personal expertise is the geomicrobiology of extreme Earth environments, especially caves and mines, and astrobiology. As a lifelong human space exploration advocate, she co-founded the Case for Mars conferences in the 1980s and 1990s. That makes her a founding member of the Mars Underground as well. She is a

member of Explore Mars. She looks pretty great in a fake spacesuit. She earned her PhD in microbiology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She was, till recently, the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute based at Ames, and is a former professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the New Mexico Institute for Mining and Technology. Also, the former associate director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute. Welcome, Penny. Thank you. Great to be here. Dr. Jim Green is the NASA chief scientistist. He received his Ph.D. in Space Physics from the University of Iowa in 1979 and has worked for NASA ever since.

That included 12 years as the Director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters. Under his leadership, more than a dozen planetary missions were successfully executed, including the Curiosity rover and InSight lander, both of which are still quite active and delivering great science on Mars. Jim is NASA's representative on the COSPAR Planetary Protection Panel, where planetary protection guidelines are created and agreed to internationally. COSPAR, that's the Committee on Space Research. In 19, excuse me, 1915, you're not that old, Jim.

And in 2015, Jim coordinated NASA's involvement in one of my favorite movies, The Martian. Talk about infecting a planet. By the way, he also hosts the excellent NASA podcast called Gravity Assist. Welcome, Jim. Thank you very much, Matt. I'm delighted to be here.

So let's back up a little bit and talk about the current status of exploration on Mars now and what's going to be happening there, well, in less than a year now with the arrival of this new rover. Tell us, what's the status of Perseverance? Well, Matt, Perseverance is actually moving forward. It's all down at the Cape. And in fact, the radioisotope power system is already connected. It's checked out in many ways. It still has a number of things to do yet, but we're making great progress. So it is on track for a July 17th open window for us to be able to launch. And that's when that highway opens up for the next three weeks that can get us to Mars. This is like almost everything NASA sends to around the solar system nowadays, an international effort, right?

It is. And indeed, this particular rover has got a fabulous set of instruments where we have participation from Spain on a weather system. We have Norway having a ground penetrating radar. We have the French working with us on some really great camera and laser systems. And we have an Italian retroreflector. But the whole point of this particular mission is really at the end of the arm. This is where we have high-resolution images that we want to be able to really look at the rock record and then make decisions in terms of creating cores. It's got a core at the very end of it, what these cores look like. They're

like a piece of chalk in size, or for those that are young enough that don't really understand what chalks and chalkboards were all about in their education, like a Crayola crayon, one of the large sizes. Once those cores are made, they're stuck indeed into an aluminum sleeve and then dropped on the surface for then later pickup and bring back. So by the end of that decade, the 2020s, we hope to be able to have these samples back in our bio level four facility and begin the process of really looking through them to determine their viability and allowing scientists to get access to them for further research. So we're doing great. And even though she resembles her sister on Mars, Curiosity, you've given at least a couple of

examples in that image and with those cores, especially of the new capabilities that Perseverance is bringing to the red planet. Pretty powerful machine, isn't it? Oh, it absolutely is. And the rock record is so important to us. You know, we know that Mars was a blue planet early on in its history. It went through rapid climate change. It was a blue planet during the time we know Earth had life started on it. And so maybe life started on Mars too. And so we're really quite excited about going there and interrogating that, being able to bring back those samples and look at them. You know, for all the minerals we have here on Earth, there are hundreds of minerals for which life is such a key part of that create those minerals.

And so if we can find the right set of information, indeed that press conference you talked about would be really lively. So sample return, you know, I often refer to it as the holy grail of robotic exploration of Mars and could be for other places as well. This was how we envision right now working with our international community to be able to get those samples back. And it all requires NASA landing a Mars ascent vehicle. We then have fetch rovers that pick up those samples that we laid on the ground and deliver those. And then we launch off of Mars those samples in a container, and then that container goes into orbit for which then an ESA satellite will come down using ion propulsion into low Mars orbit, pick those samples

up, and then bring them back to Earth. It's indeed a multinational effort, and the planning is going real well. Penny, you're a longtime Martian. What's it going to mean to scientists like you to get those samples back here and into our nice big labs on Earth? Well, you know, as you say, Matt, it's been a holy grail for many decades and pretty much my whole career. I'm sure that's true for a lot of us. The opportunity to actually get our lab facilities here on Earth to bring all of their power to bear on samples is a new step really in marching forward to be able to analyze Mars

materials. The missions that we've had so far and the ones to come are magnificent, but there's only a certain amount that you can smash onto a spacecraft and a lander and a rover before you run out of power and mass and all of that. And so the ability to do these really in detail studies of the geochemistry, the mineralogy, the foundational bedrock materials, perhaps even some of the fine materials on Mars, will give us insights into the climate history of that planet, which is very important to our understanding of climate in general on our own planet and beyond, and also potentially allow us to look at organic materials and various other things that may be significant for the potential history of any life that

may have arisen on Mars. Jim, I want to go back to you. I gave short shrift to all of the success we've already seen on Mars with two active spacecraft on the surface and that flotilla on orbit above the planet. Where are we in what we've learned? I mean, we found the water. Are we still following it? And what else have we found? That's a really great question in the sense that, you know, there are more, there's more to it than just following the water. You know, we've seen evidence of water all over the place on Mars, that's clear.

We've seen what we call a reoccurring slope lineae, where water may actually be pouring down the sides of craters in a seasonal way. This is during a time period during, indeed, that summer, where the sunlight shines on the crater walls, perhaps sublimates a water plug that's sitting, holding back water in an aquifer, and then that water pours out and runs down the slopes. We've measured that. We know it's water. Now, some of these actually may be drifts of dust and therefore producing some discoloration, but there's so much of it, and there's so many places where it's occurring. We're pretty convinced that indeed there is a significant amount of water locked inside the planet. Now, in addition to that, Mars seems to be emitting what

we would call traces of life gases, like methane and like oxygen. I'm knocking on wood. Yeah, right. And indeed, although those things can be generated abiotically for the methane, we've been observing methane from telescopes on Earth since the early 2000s. But now with Curiosity making those measurements directly over and over again, we do see that seasonal bloom, what we'd call this rush of methane coming out, although it's still a trace gas, you know, parts per billion we're talking about. That is coming from

underneath the surface. Now that could be generated abiotically. It requires water, requires certain minerals in a heat source like magma, or it could be old methane from old life in the past that has also been trapped over time and is being released. Or indeed, it could be an indication of life there today in the aquifers is what we would think. So those trace gases now are extremely important. We're making fabulous measurement of those. Both for methane and oxygen, there have been some conflicting data, hasn't there, depending on the observer? Yeah, indeed.

The oxygen observations that were just released over the last several months is a long-term trend. It's about five years' worth of observations, and it's a surprising trend. You know, as the planet goes through its seasonal cycle, we expect during the winter, because it's so cold, that a lot of the atmospheric gases, in particular the trace gases, will collapse down into the surface. And then as it warms up, it actually then releases those. And what we're finding is an excess of oxygen during certain times.

And then at other times, we see that the oxygen actually is being removed. So this has really caused quite a puzzle. We've had many scientists really working, trying to figure out what are the abiotic, in other words, the non-biological reasons that this is happening. And we really haven't come up with a good explanation. So the oxygen observations are really one we want to stay abreast of and see what curiosity is going to find in the future. we want to stay abreast of and see what curiosity is going to find in the future.

Penny, have we seen evidence other than what Jim has just talked about that could indicate biological activity or at least past biological activity up there? Well, you know, so far we haven't had the opportunity to closely examine materials, getting back to our previous discussion about sample return. But what we have been able to do, of course, is hook up what we understand about extreme environments on Earth and try to tease out the parts of those environments that are relevant to Mars. It's pretty clear we have nowhere on Earth that is just like Mars. It's a very, very challenging environment. But we have challenging environments on Earth it is just like Mars. It's a very, very challenging environment. But we have challenging environments on Earth that have components that really go into that Mars picture.

And so microorganisms in their vast diversity, their unbelievable diversity on this planet, have adapted to a wild variety of conditions. Many of them are the conditions that we see in the Mars surface, and particularly, of course, from my point of view as someone very interested in the subsurface, both near and deep subsurface, where there is more protection from some of the nasty things that you get on the Mars surface. So I think that the importance of the gases

that Jim has just been articulating is really because the atmosphere of a planet is its breath, essentially, and the breath of life on Earth is very, very clear. We have a very complicated atmospheric spectrum, which is the sum total of all of the complex gases that life on our planet puts out. When we're looking at a planet like Mars, if we're looking at life that has been not as globally as it is here on Earth for a long time, that is something of a relic biosphere, then we would expect to see a much more subdued signal. But the fact that there is this oxygen variability and the fact that we see these traces of methane are very exciting. Because what that might say about life is that if it exists in

subsurface, there's a certain leak rate, just like we have with spacesuits and spacecraft and Earth itself, and that we may be catching little whiffs of what's going on underneath. In any case, whether or not it's biology or it's non-biology, when you have a life-bearing solar system like ours, in my view, every planet matters to understanding that life, even if that life only occurs on one planet. And of course, we certainly hope it occurs on Mars or has occurred on Mars, as well as other places in the solar system. Much more of my conversation with Penny Boston

and Jim Green is only a minute or so away. Hi, this is Kate from the Planetary Society. How does space spark your creativity? We want to hear from you. Whether you make cosmic art, take photos through a telescope, write haikus about the planets, or invent space games for your family, really any creative activity that's space-related, we invite you to share it with us. You can add your work to our collection by emailing it to us at connect at planetary dot org. That's connect at planetary dot org. Thanks! Penny, you have spent a good part of your life going to places most of us would not want to go, looking for how life has found a way to survive. One of those more milder

locations, I remember being with you at Carlsbad Caverns, and you pointed to a spot on the wall and you said, you see that? That's life-eating copper. So it does sure look like the enormous variety of extremophiles that we find on our planet. It's got to give you some encouragement, right? Oh, very much. Even though I'm a Mars fan for my entire life, of course, I have an eye on the other potential habitats. And I think that the fact that we have organisms that appear to be able to tolerate almost everything, including high radiation and organisms that have been retrieved from, you know, space exposure and complete desiccation and living amongst metals that we find toxic, but they're busy using inorganic chemistry to make

those into energy sources, makes me really understand the sweep of what our type of life, meaning organic carbon in a water matrix, is capable of. It's really quite extraordinary. Life as we know it. Yeah, life as we know it. And of course, you know, many of us consider life as we don't know it. And that life as we don't know it extends to other ways of making life even out of organic carbon. So there are people thinking about other alternative sets of chemistry that might work on other planets. But from the point of view of Mars, my conviction is that we're really looking for carbon-based life in a water matrix because

Mars is not all that different from Earth. And certainly, as Jim pointed out, early in its history, it was much more similar. And so that early childhood of our rocky terrestrial planets together seems to me very significant. And even Venus in its current state, which is quite inhospitable to life as we understand it, but its early history may have also shared in habitable zones. So it's not just Mars alone that is compelling, but really Mars as this beautiful red jewel within this entire spectrum, this entire crown of jewels that we have in our solar system and what they offer for life. is that key term. Has it led you to the point where you think that if we had life staring us in the face, we would recognize it? Well, yes, maybe. The slide that was just put up shows a variety, and this, of course, is from my own work. All of these colorful and drippy, gooey things that you see are all examples of microbes, as tiny as they are, but making major changes in the rock and mineral environments that they live in.

that's all rock breakdown material that's been chewed through by organisms that use manganese and iron, rather than, you know, eating hamburgers for lunch, they eat rock, and they use those minerals, and then they poop out, so to speak, all of this fluffy stuff. And so they're, you know, they're major geological agents on Earth, but it shows that they can make their living off a geological source. You can see the screaming blue patch that one of my French colleagues is standing by, sort of in the middle, lower part of the screen, and you can see an example of the same process. You were talking, Matt, about the copper material that I showed you. These are organisms all over the world. They're different and very unrelated, but they still are able to do the same thing. And so that makes me even more excited because it doesn't have to be the same organisms. It's finding a pathway of organisms in different places

that can use the same energy sources. And so to me, that seems like an encouraging sign for extraterrestrial life. Jim, I want to jump back now to that hypothetical that I posed at the outset, that press conference, which you would very likely be a part of. I hope you're still on the job in 2024. You've got big news for us. What's this going to mean if indeed we find evidence better than we've gotten in the past? I'm thinking of a certain meteorite, ALH 84001, that seems hard to argue with, that maybe we have found at least evidence of past life on Mars. What's that going to mean to us here on Earth? Well, let me just mention, of course, there is an important aspect of thinking about that future when we start that announcement. And that really boils down to looking at what's happened in the past by analogies.

The ALH 84001 is a good one in the sense that we would organize that press conference. On that press conference, we would have the scientists that are announcing the discovery, but also scientists that are a little skeptical. That announcement then would go out to the public. And then there would be a period where the community of scientists would really dig into the results. Perhaps if we've returned samples soon after that, they would then be able to have those in the laboratory, et cetera, and really tease it out, and then public reaction. And then an education has to go on to everyone in terms of the context of what this means. But if we just take that supposition, that indeed, in the long run, it proves to be true, and we have found that second genesis, and it is on Mars, what does that mean? And here,

by analogy, I think we have to look at perhaps several. One comes to mind is what Copernicus did. At the time, Copernicus was coming out with the theory that the planets went around the sun, and not everything went around the earth, it changed the worldview. Everyone mentally had to now rearrange their thoughts about their place in the solar system and the universe. And it had a profound effect. People thought, well, we are the center of the universe because everything goes around us. And now they go around the sun, just like the other planets. And then to them, that means, well, maybe there are other societies like us on other planets.

This was a really profound change. I think, indeed, we're going to have to come to grips with that. Many people, because of our literature and our movies, are all set to accept that there's a second Genesis out there. And in fact, many scientists, and that would include me, think it's almost inconceivable that there isn't some sort of life out, not only in solar system, but certainly on other planets. And so our worldview then, once again, will have to change. And I think it will change many different things. The results of finding microbes might be as revolutionary as cracking DNA. is only a handful of decades old, has just been phenomenal. That is awaiting us with this kind of discovery if we do indeed find microbial life on Mars, I think. Penny, what would this mean to you and your colleagues, this announcement and the provision of this data? Well, you know, I spent my entire life doing this, and so have many of my colleagues. So I have dreamed about that happening in my lifetime. I hope it does. I'm trying to stay as healthy as possible to get the maximum chance. we got any kind of indication that there might be extant life or even extinct life, okay? Because I also do paleo microbiology, and I'm interested in the entire deep history of planets with life.

The entire community would go into a frenzy of trying to test whatever features this potential life would have. And so there would be an enormous flourishing, maybe in directions that we're already pursuing, maybe in new directions. It depends on what those results would find. And then I would throw one heck of a big party. I'd like to attend that. Please invite me.

I will. We should get into the topic that maybe our sponsors here at Explore Mars are most interested in. After all, they are the humans to Mars people. And that is what the possibility, evidence for not just past, but possibly existing life on Mars, stuff that's still kicking up its heels there today, would mean for sending humans there. Jim, you were a big contributor to that movie, The Martian. Yes. It would not be a good idea for us to head there and plant poop potatoes, would it? No, actually, Curiosity has found the nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, and sulfur on Mars, all the right stuff.

The soils are moist. And indeed, there's nitrates in the soils. Now, where Curiosity is sitting turns out to have alkaline soils, not acidic. So what would grow better here would be beans and asparagus. better here would be beans and asparagus. And I don't know about you, but if I had to eat two or three years worth of asparagus, I'd just take my helmet off and walk outside. But I'm assuming, I could do the potatoes. I'm assuming, we all are assuming there'll be more acidic soils too elsewhere. And so indeed, the analogies between Mars soils and Earth soils is really strong. That's really quite important. If we found evidence for current life, that current life has to be below the surface.

We haven't found evidence of life on the surface. And for human exploration, I think we'd have to talk about how we're going to share Mars. And I think we can share Mars. There are many approaches, unlike the Martian, where the concept was you land Ares I, and the next time it's Ares II, Ares III, Ares IV. We would plan to go to one particular area, perhaps 150 or 200 kilometer area called an exploration zone, where we land in one part, live in another part, and then have the ability, mobility, to go around and perform a whole variety of scientific experiments, but really confine ourselves to that part of Mars. And in so doing, then, it gives us a wonderful opportunity, perhaps over several decades of continuing to

go there and continuing to build and develop things at that site, an opportunity to really learn and obtain a deep understanding of what Mars is all about. And then we can take it to the next step with that kind of knowledge. So I'm all for sharing Mars. Now, you may know that many scientists, particularly Carl Sagan, thought that if we found microbes on Mars, we need to leave Mars alone and go to another body in the solar system. But I think because life also has to evolve over time, the evolution of that life is going to be completely different than ours. And that gives us, I think, an opportunity to coexist. And those are some of the new ideas that are coming out now. Annie, what's your view about all this? I mean, I think you want to see boots on Mars as well,

but... I'd like to see my boots on Mars. Me too. But I'm going to be too old, I'm afraid. But it's something I've wrestled with my entire career because I have this desire for exploration for our species to go beyond to other bodies in our solar system. And who knows someday, even out of our solar system in some number of hundreds of years. But at the same time, of course, I'm very, very aware of the deep ecology aspects of another biosphere. And this applies to Mars or any other biosphere that we may find in

our solar system. And that is how do we study it? How do we perhaps cohabit with it, as Jim points out, without doing damage to it, and in turn, without doing damage to us. I think that many years ago, probably 25, when I first started writing about the Mars subsurface as being the best place to look for life on Mars, it was not taken very seriously. We knew a lot less about the planet at that time, but we've plugged along on that theme, and I think it's become manifest that that is the place, as Jim says, where we would have the highest chance of finding subsurface life, even if Mars for organisms when circumstances change on the surface. We see this in microorganisms and macro organisms. So there are caves with fish and invertebrates that have been separated for 20 million years from the surface and things of that sort. So I think that the expectation that I have is that any Mars life is going to be quite deep. And that

helps us with this conundrum. Because as long as we don't contaminate aquifers, as we're trying to get resources for human use, then the surface Mars environment is very harsh. And while I wouldn't call it entirely self-sterilizing, it will do a lot to reduce the plume of biological contaminants within some distance from a human colony. And then, of course, if we want to study things like the slope lineae, these trickles of water, briny water that Jim mentioned early on in our discussion. Those are juicy targets, literally and figuratively. We can't wait to get our hands on them, but our hands will not be our hands. Our hands will hopefully be sterilizable robotic sampling devices that we'll be able to send out and bring those samples back for analysis. So there are ways to do this. And, you know,

we're living through it now with this pandemic that we're all experiencing. How do we separate our activities from, in this case, a pathogen, but in the case of humans on Mars, how do we separate ourselves from potential organisms that are the Martians and keep all of us safe. And so all of these real-world things are being worked out in real time. And as you mentioned, that Jim is on the COSPAR panel, that dates back to the 1950s and the early part of the space age. So it's not like we just discovered that, oh, gee, there might be a problem. Many of us have served on panels and workshops,

and we're writing about it all the time. So it's very, very much foremost in our minds about how to do this safely. I think we can do it. I hope I'm not being naive. Jim, I'm really glad that Penny brought us back to that Coast Park Committee where you are the planetary protection representative from NASA, from the United States. How is this being considered by the international community, these questions of protecting Mars, but also wanting to go there and have humans explore? Well, indeed, COSPAR over the years has looked at each and every one of the bodies in the solar system that were being considered by space agencies to go to. And indeed, early on, we didn't know much about the moon in terms of whether there will be pathogens

there. And so consequently, those guidelines that came from the COSPAR committee that the international community signed up to meant that we, for a NASA perspective, wanted to implement a quarantine system. So when samples came back from Apollo 11, you know, the astronauts went into quarantine and the samples went into quarantine. And then we went through our processes of indeed interrogating those and understanding what they are, what we had, whether there were pathogens, interrogating those and understanding what they are, what we had, whether there were pathogens, etc., watching the astronauts over a period of time. And then finally, recognize that indeed, we could have uncontained sample return from Mars. We didn't need to go through the quarantine process. And so then that means the guidelines were revised. So the committee indeed takes it

very seriously that as we learn new things about each of the bodies that the space agencies are planning to go to, we take that into account to modify those guidelines. And that's been working really well. In fact, just recently, we took a good look at Phobos, and we recognized that Phobos, indeed, one of the moons of Mars, we could actually back off some of the more string Earth return of those samples. And the Japanese JAXA mission is being planned to go there and has many international connections and components to it. But that required for us to bring all the knowledge we knew about Phobos forward and not consider it like Mars in a category of more restriction. And so we're going to continue to do that. And that process is working well. Penny, you touched on it, but it's a question that Explore Mars CEO Chris Carberry

posed before we started this. And that is whether what we have learned about both how we might handle isolating ourselves from life on Mars or anything else in the field of astrobiology might have helped prepare us to deal with the challenge that we're facing around this planet right now, the pandemic. I mean, do you see any relationship there? Yes, I do. I think that one of the things that this horrible circumstance will maybe help is eventually in better public communication. You know, when you are trying to talk to people who are not microbiologists or scientists of some other sort about microbial life, it's very hard to communicate the size of these individual entities, their capabilities, and just how easily spread they are. You know, in many cases,

that's very benign. There are many microorganisms that we need in our environment. They basically run a lot of the biogeochemical cycles on our own planet. So on balance, they're beneficial. We only sort of notice them on the broad scale when they're deleterious, like in the case of the COVID-19. But you can derive some lessons from this. The fact that we have a new virus on the scene means even though it's related to other earth viruses and similar to others in its group of coronaviruses, it's many different properties. And so a lot of the scrambling that's going on now in the medical and research communities is to try to figure out its properties. The way that we do that in real time is orders of magnitude accelerated compared

to what we would have been able to do with something like this even 20 years ago. So within mere weeks, we had an entire genomic sequence for this RNA type of virus that was propagated around the world. The biggest issue is, you know, we are a world full of people with different traditions, different levels of technical sophistication, and different access to communication. And so it's the human response to that that's been the trickiest part. One of the things that I think is important to communicate is that microorganisms, for the most part, are benign and absolutely essential to us. And so one of the things I don't want to see is an increase in sort of mindless germophobia from this. And you know, that could be a natural outgrowth of this. But we are talking about studying microbial scale life on another planet, although we're mostly looking at bacterial size

things. And if you look, if you look at a bacterium, you can probably line up maybe 80 or 100 of them across the diameter of one of your hairs. But if I were going to put viruses across the diameter of your hair, I would probably put a thousand or two thousand, right? So they're even more minuscule. So I think we're mostly focusing on bacteria-size organisms. So those are actually much easier to control and work with for the most part than the viruses because the viruses are tinier than dust specks, whereas the bacteria are much chunkier. And so our methods of controlling bacteria and working with them in many ways are easier. Yes, Penny did a wonderful

job explaining the various aspects of that. What's critical also to understand is, you know, viruses aren't considered alive. They really are cellular parasites, if I were to describe them in some way. And they invade the body and they have some genetic material associated with them. But in reality, for them to live and grow, they actually have to co-evolve with a host. And so when we think about bringing material back from Mars that is alive, that life has perhaps a second genesis, perhaps is related in some way to us in terms of the fact that it started in a similar environment like Earth, but it has a completely different evolutionary track. And so the current thinking is, yes, we're going to quarantine those

samples. Yes, they'll be in what we call a bio level four facility, you know, where they handle anthrax and everything else. And it will be closely monitored. But I think, as Penny points out, our ability to understand that the microbial and virus environment will allow us to use those current tools to interrogate those samples and begin the process of releasing things to the science community, which will be really important to do because that's where those laboratory equipment really comes into play. Many places around the world that will really tease out some of the most spectacular science in terms of really having a deep understanding of that planet than we can dream up today. So those are all just right around the corner, you know, and I'm hoping also to be around when we start cracking into that next generation. You and me and Penny, all of us,

and everybody watching this program, I am sure. Now, I was alive in high school at the time of the lunar landings, and it was just awe-inspiring, even with the grainy, yucky, you know, black and white TV. And so today, we're going to be doing it in high definition and the colors will be spectacular and the shadows will be long and it will be incredibly eerie, but it will be just as inspirational. So everyone, you know, that hasn't seen that original lunar landing of any of the Apollo astronauts have really got a treat in store for them. And that's coming up. What a great way for us to end this wonderful conversation. I want to thank both of you.

There truly were no better people to be a part of this discussion of life on Mars and why we examples of life down here are so excited about it. Thank you, Jim Green, NASA Chief Scientist. Thank you, Penny Boston of NASA Ames, astrobiologist. And thanks to all of you for tuning in, for joining us for this, and to Explore Mars for making it all happen, and the great people there who have been helping us out, Wade, Janet, Chris, Ron Sparkman, Adrienne, and keep looking up there at Mars.

We're there and we're going back. Thanks again for joining us. Have a great day and stay safe. Live long and prosper. Live long and prosper. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Matt.

Take care, Penny. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. That means that we are joined by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, the program manager for LightSail 2, which could be over your head right now. In fact, it probably is. We're everywhere. You can't escape us. Welcome back.

Thank you. Good to be back. I got a message from Allie saying that her boyfriend Galen is an avid listener of Planetary Radio and a member of the Planetary Society. It's his 30th birthday on May 2nd. She's hoping that we could express our condolence. No, I'm sorry. Give him a happy birthday wishes. As you know, Bruce, we can't do that.

We're sorry. No, no, we cannot. Like if we did it for you, we'd have to do it for, let's all say it together, everyone. But you can. Here's our birthday gift to you, Galen. You can join in on Thursday, April 30th at 1 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern, 20-hundred hours UTC. Go to planetary.org slash live, and you will be part of the first Planetary Society Live, better known this week as What's Up Live,

because Bruce and I will be the very first ones to start this new weekly series of live and interactive events from the Planetary Society, planetary.org slash live. And I love it because you have to do all the heavy lifting. We'll see. We'll see, Matt. It's like a live and interactive what's up, right? Exactly.

So we'll do the random space facts and the trivia and the night sky. And we'll probably take some trivia in real time. And we'll put up some graphics. And mostly we'll just be the usual goofballs that we are. For all of about 30 minutes. All right. Maybe we should talk about the night sky. Oh, do we do that? We used to.

Venus now at the brightest pretty much that it ever is, a ridiculous astronomical apparent magnitude of minus 4.7, which is really, really bright. It has also moved into being a crescent, if you look at it through a telescope, and it will get more crescent-y, get dimmer, and start dropping lower in the west after sunset in the coming weeks. So check out Venus. In the pre-dawn, we've got the three planets hanging out. Upper right is bright Jupiter, and this is the pre-dawn east, bright Jupiter, yellowish Saturn, and then reddish Mars as you go towards your lower left. Mars is separating away. It doesn't want to associate with Jupiter and Saturn anymore, those gas giants, you know, social stigma. They're gassy. We were looking for one comet to brighten in May, and then we were looking for another,

but Comet Atlas, she's breaking up. She's breaking. Also seems to be disintegrating, so I wouldn't get your hopes up for a bright comet in May, but we'll keep you posted. Oh, wait, it almost is May. Let's move on, shall we? On to this week in space history. In 1989, Magellan was released by the space shuttle and headed off on its way to radar map the surface of Venus.

Oh, and radar. Radar's going to surface of Venus. Oh, and radar. Radar's going to come up again. Oh, cool. On to... I went down a rabbit hole learning about this. So I'm sure Matt and many of our listeners are familiar with the astronaut symbol, the U.S. astronauts and the lapel pin, which looks like three lines headed up to a star going through a halo or an elliptical thing. spacecraft centers roundup from 1964 that those three lines rather than just being kind of a generic shooting star kind of looking thing actually represent unifying the mercury gemini

and apollo teams as one set of astronauts i've also seen things that don't refer to it that way but it seemed like a pretty good source. What's also interesting, and part of this random space fact, is that they are awarded silver lapel pins when they graduate from astronaut candidacy to being full-blown astronauts, and then they get gold ones when they fly in space. That is fascinating. I did not know that. Now, really, they ought to add two more lines, That is fascinating. I did not know that. Now, really, they ought to add two more lines, one for the space shuttle, and maybe now for commercial crew, which is about to happen. The circle ellipse represents an orbit, by the way, not surprisingly. Ah, okay. Not the moon. I don't know. I'll dive back down the rabbit hole. Let us move on to the trivia contest, shall we?

You, you wild man, had NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on a couple shows ago. So I asked him, what kind of aircraft did NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine fly combat missions off the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln? How'd we do, Matt? One of our few non-space related trivia questions. We have a winner. He's a past winner, but it has been nearly two and a half years since Neil Ashleman's name came up in the random.org hopper. Neil out of Davenport, Iowa. I happen to know that he's right about this because it's right there in Jim Bridenstine's official NASA bio. You can even find it on our website, I'm told. It says, Jim flew the E2C Hawkeye. But wait, we had someone from Iowa win something involving the Hawkeye?

Yes, we did. Isn't that wonderful? That is. He says, the strange radome on top of that bad boy or its earlier cousins always fascinated me as a kid. Congratulations, Neil. Neil is one of those who we are going to offer an outgoing message or whatever else you want us to record. We just recorded a couple for a couple of the other winners. From Bruce and me for your voicemail system or replace your doorbell chime with it. That'd be fun. Ernest Jacobs in the state of New York, which is a state of mind. He says, ready?

Hmm, this wasn't on my radar. From Mark Little in Northern Ireland, recent winner. As of 2016, Bridenstine is a state of Oklahoma record holder in, are you ready for this? Bruce and I, fellow former competitive swimmers, record holder in the 200 meter long course freestyle relay. Really?

Wow. So it says, as of 2016. So who knows since then? I'm going to still give him a lot of credit one way or the other. Martin Hajoski he now spends, that is Jim Bridenstine now spending a lot of his time in congressional hearings might be wishing he was back in combat

maybe finally a poem from Gene Lewin in Washington arising from a flat top roost upon Pacific Sea's enabling sight beyond horizon's line back to its floating airy, the name of this winged craft for over miles it can spy, like hero from Mohican last,

it bears the name Hawkeye. E2C was the version, though it was also dubbed with a nickname not quite as grand. It was called Super FUD. Super FUD. Super FUD. That's it for this round. We have a cool prize for the next time around.

Yeah, you want to start that up for us? Back to astronaut pins. Whose silver astronaut lapel pin is on the moon? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until Wednesday, May 6th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And here's the prize. The great space artist, Michelle Roche, she had given us some stuff, donated some work to give away some time ago.

And somehow this fell between the cracks, apparently, or into a crack, I suppose. It's a print of Neil Armstrong that she did, let's see, about six years ago. It apparently has been a very popular work from her. It comes with a certificate of authenticity from Michelle. And this will be yours. It's a lovely print, number 11 of 500, of Neil, the first man himself. I have it here so it'll be easy, relatively easy, to get it out to our winner. Excellent. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about marsupials. Thank you, and good night.

Maybe I should have said it. It must have fallen into someone's pouch. By the way, Michelle's website is www.rooch.com. I bet you could just do rooch.com. Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. And if you manage to join us in time, you can join us live at planetary.org slash live for What's Up Live. We'll post it after the fact for those of you who missed it, and you can enjoy it in retrospect as well. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members, who know that we are the Martians. You can join our Martian Chronicles at planetary.org membership. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser.

Be safe, everyone. Ad aires. Ares.