Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Living and Working on Mars—A Conversation at the International Space Development Conference

Episode Date: May 20, 2014

Planetary Radio visits the 33rd ISDC to talk with three explorers who’ve set their sights on the Red Planet: MD and space medicine researcher Susan Jewell, Meteorite Man Geoff Notkin, and Mars Program Formulation Office Manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Charles Whetsel.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Living and working on Mars this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier and this week to the 33rd International Space Development Conference in Southern California, where the space development community has come to share big ideas and bigger dreams. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. In a few minutes, we'll open a conversation about our future on the Red Planet. We've also got our usual visits with Bill Nye and Bruce Betts. Bruce will be helping me give away a Little Bits electronic space kit during this week's What's Up segment. First, though, someone who is a major participant here at the ISDC,

Planetary Society Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we're going to get into something that is just spectacular and right off the presses, if there's a web sense of that. First, because you talked about Rosetta last week, almost immediately after we spoke, there was a pretty interesting image development. That's right. They published a set of images for Rosetta's OSIRIS camera, which is the main science camera on the spacecraft. It's a little early for science right now. They've been taking photos with that camera in order to better their optical navigation toward the comet. But lo and behold, they made a discovery that the

comet has begun cometary activity as it approaches the sun. So in these images, a series of photos taken between March and May, you can see a tail beginning to develop, which is pretty exciting because that, of course, is exactly the kind of thing that they're going to the comet to study. All right, let's move on to this very much hands-on entry that you have just posted at planetary.org in your blog. It's a really cool new feature that we've just developed for the website, the ability to take a pair of images, a before and after pair, and sort of swipe in between them with the mouse.

You can look at the before image and then swipe over it to look at the after image. And what I'm comparing are two self-portraits of Curiosity, taken very early in the mission and one again more recently. And you can see just how much dust has accumulated on the rover's deck. It really is fun to play with. And there is one below that, just for good measure, that is even more dramatic, showing Opportunity. That's right. Opportunity was a very dusty rover at the beginning of 2014. The rover was almost camouflaged against the Martian soil.

And then just two months later, the deck was quite clean. And I've heard since then, the deck has gotten even cleaner. It's almost as clean as it was when they landed. Again, this is a cool before and after comparison. You can just see how all the dust has just been swept away off of the solar panel. So give some credit to the folks who are behind this work. The images of Curiosity were mosaicked by Thomas Appare, who's an amateur image processor, and he aligned them very carefully so that when you swipe back and forth between the images,

it's almost as if the rover stands still. But you look in the background, you can see the rover's moved quite a lot between the two photos. And same is true for Opportunity. Those images were mosaicked by the Cornell image processing team and aligned by me. One more thing we want to mention about Curiosity I know you're also excited about, and that is that it

has finally stopped to do some more drilling. Yes, Curiosity did just complete drilling at the Windjanna site at the Kimberley outcrop, and as of the time that we're talking now, has recently driven away from the Kimberley and is on the road again to Mount Sharp. So you can read about all of this and see the great images and play with the ones that are before and after on the blog, in the blog, planetary.org. Emily, thanks so much as always. Thank you, Matt. Senior Editor for the Planetary Society.

She is also our Planetary Evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Here's Bill Nye, the science guy, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, I've got to welcome you back. We did get a very nice summary from our colleague, Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society Director of Advocacy, about what you guys were up to in D.C. last week. It was a good week, wasn't it? Oh, yes. We went from office to office schmoozing, interacting with Congress people directly, senators directly, and their staffers. As the old saying goes, Washington's a small town based on relationships.

And whether or not you live in the United States, NASA is very important to space exploration writ large worldwide. It's still three times the size of any other space agency or administration. And so we were there talking to the people that provide the funds for NASA and specifically the funds for planetary science. We met with Administrator Bolden, call me Charlie Bolden himself, along with Ellen Stofan, his chief scientist. We got everybody on board with the idea that planetary science is what NASA does best right now. It brings out the best in NASA. And so it needs to be funded at a reasonable level. And that level, we've done analysis, that level is $1.5 billion a year.

And so the more people we get familiar with the Planetary Society, the easier it is to get our succinct message across. So it was a really good trip. Even as you are walking the halls there on Capitol Hill, things are deteriorating with Russia. Is that the word, deteriorating? I suppose it's one. Russian-sponsored troops are in the proximity of people who lived in Crimea and Ukraine, and there's a lot of tension.

Meanwhile, the United States uses Russian rocket engines. This famous RD-180 is this great engine, kind of designing them as a bit of a dark art. And so there's a concern that not only are these engines used for taking cargo to the International Space Station, they're also used by United States firms, United Launch Alliance specifically, for military rockets. So then the Russian space agency would have the legal right not to sell them. It just shows what a tangle it can be, politics and space exploration. Man, oh man. Oh, by the way, Matt, the first thing, you're in Senator Bill Nelson's office, and he talked to us at length. You know, he's very excited to get U.S. astronauts going to the International Space Station on U.S.-built rockets.

And he's focused on this. There's going to be a lot of political, maybe not maneuvering, but weight thrown around to influence the production of rockets in the United States while this unusual sort of Cold War business is going on in Eastern Europe. It's history, man. It's history. Thank you, Bill, for sharing a little bit of history in the making with us. Thank you, man. That's Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye the Science Guy. We're back at the International Space Development Conference, the annual celebration of space development and exploration

created by the National Space Society. I've been an NSS member even longer than I've been part of the Planetary Society. This year's conference has attracted an interstellar list of movers and shakers. Some are veteran explorers and fighters for the final frontier, but it's especially gratifying to see lots of young people attending the many conference sessions. These are the faces of new space, a generation that grew up with the space shuttle and the International Space Station, with a certain knowledge that planets are the rule in the Milky Way galaxy, not the exception,

with scores of interplanetary voyages by robotic explorers and with new commercial providers of rockets and spacecraft who have set their sights on Mars and the stars. Elon Musk of SpaceX says he won't start selling public shares in that company till there are regular shuttles running between the green hills of Earth and human outposts on Mars. Now, we can admire his optimism, but getting people to the red planet, difficult as it will be, is only the beginning.

With me today are guests who have fought a long time, long and hard, about this challenge. Charles Wetzel and his colleagues have actually triumphed over it, at least at the level of robotic colonists. Charles heads the Mars Program Formulation Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the foremost explorer of that planet on this planet. Over his 25 years at JPL, he has also served as Chief Engineer for the Mars Exploration Program and as Project Systems Engineer for Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. Charles, welcome to Planetary Radio. Thanks, Matt. Glad to be here.

What is the most important thing we have learned about keeping an amazingly complex device running for years and years in that very nasty environment? I think the thing that really we have to give ourselves credit for is just testing the heck out of stuff before you send it there. Trying to think of everything that could possibly go wrong, putting everything through its paces back here on Earth, testing it to two times, three times, four times what you expect to see on Mars. You know, we always joke about you send these spacecraft to the Mars that you worry you're going to run into, not the Mars that you've seen before. And so we're getting smarter about understanding the environment, understanding the range of temperatures we're going to see, the range of dust we're going to see, the range of dust storms we're going to see,

all those sorts of things. But that constructive paranoia in the back of your head says always, just dial it up one more notch and be ready. Be expecting the unexpected. So do we need to mention that 90-day warranty once again, and opportunity still going? Yeah, that's probably the biggest dividend that we've gotten back in that category. And that's when the dust and the testing both kind of went together on that. If the worst case models had been as bad as they could have been, then the 90 days really was where it was. And we didn't believe, you know, we didn't want to count on that really being the worst case. So we tested past that point. We put an extra margin

beyond that point. And sometimes people forget just how much margin you've added on top of those things. But we're glad we did it. And it's really paid off in the long run. Have these successful experiences, and we should remember, it's been a good run lately, but they weren't always so. Mars is hard. Space is hard. Has it given you encouragement as we look forward to humans on Mars? Yeah, it does. There are a lot of things. You look at how much we know about Mars today,

and I definitely think it's fair to say we understand Mars a lot better today than we understood the moon when we made the commitment to send humans to the moon. And so in some ways, you know, it makes it that much easier to send people, to make a commitment to send people to Mars. That having been said, it still is a lot further out there. You have to be prepared for a much longer trip out there. And there's still a lot of challenges that lie ahead. But we're gathering the information that we need. We look forward to doing larger scale technology demonstrations.

There's still a lot of missions we've dreamed up that we think would be useful to send that would be relevant to a future human spacecraft for human architectures, but wouldn't actually have people in it. That's actually one of the things we've been talking about at the conference here today, is a lot of people who's very enthusiastic

about the prospects of sending humans at least to Mars orbit, to the moons of Mars, use that as a first step, eventually down to the surface of Mars and getting safely off of that. And there's just a lot of opportunities for cooperative robotic and human exploration going forward. We're really excited about that. I was in one of your presentations here at ISTC just a few minutes ago, actually, and I bet there were other people who were also excited to see one of your last slides,

maybe the last one. It was an artist's rendering of what sure looked like a human vehicle on the surface of Mars. Am I right? Yeah, I have to give credit to our colleagues at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and also with support from Johnson in Houston and Langley in Virginia. But they have architectures, they have concepts to scale these things and understand how big a vehicle would it take to get down to the surface of Mars and how big would it take to get back off of the surface of Mars.

That's something we've not done either with humans or with robots, although we'd also like to do that first robotically to understand all the challenges there. But those proof-of-concept designs, it's an artist concept when it gets shown like that, but there's a lot of engineering that goes into it behind it. That helps us understand and set the marks and understand where today's technology can get us and where are the areas where the current robotic missions are not at the right scale for that,

and we need to think about a next generation of robotic missions to help blaze the trail for the humans. Charles Wetzel of JPL, he's going to stick around. You will, right? I will. Because we have a couple of other people to introduce, and then we'll all join in the conversation here at the International Space Development Conference. You know, we talk to a lot of doctors on Planetary

Radio, the PhD variety. Very few of them have an MD after their names. A new member of that exclusive club is here with us at the ISDC. Susan Jewell has, you've got just about the coolest LinkedIn profile image ever. Susan is a space physician, scientist, educator, and biomedical engineer, training in survival skills, extreme environments, pilot training, because she wants to be one of those people who goes out there, maybe even one of the first on Mars. She's doing that to train for low Earth orbit orbit and then later, hopefully, deep space missions. Trained at NASA Johnson Space Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch, Aviation and Space Medicine Program.

And she is a recipient, correct me if I'm wrong, of ESA, that's European Space Agency, scholarship to attend the International Space University. Her training as a medical scientist came from the National Institutes of Health and UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. She's a member of the Aerospace Medical Association, the Royal Aeronautical Society, Astronauts for Hire, the Mars Society, naturally, and other outward-focused organizations. Susan Jewell, welcome to Planetary Radio. Thank you so much, Matt. I'm really, really happy and honored for you to ask me as one of the guests on your show. Let's pretend it's the year 2025. Maybe my name's Elon Musk, maybe it's something

else. I've just called up your surgically implanted iPhone 12 to offer you a seat on the first colony ship headed for Mars. Are you going to take me up on it? Yes, I absolutely would take you up on it. Only with the risk of death is minimal and the survivability is really high. So all the testing, the mitigation cano measures to ensure survivability, then I would take that trip. Because for me, it's not about going there and being the first. It's about going there and surviving and colonizing Mars. The machines that Charles has been sending to Mars are made of much more durable stuff than we humans.

I suppose, though, we have the advantage of being self-repairing, and that's something you want to make sure we can continue to do on Mars? Yeah, absolutely. I think technology and engineering, and especially now with 3D printing, stem cell, where that's advancing in medicine and in research, I think all that plays a major part in enabling us to develop the capabilities for humans to go into deep space,

to survive it, and one day to really be able to colonize an off-world planet like Mars. But I do believe that we need to test-bed all these ideas and concepts, and what I'm part of is part of the group of individuals who we call ourselves analog astronauts where we literally do tests bring research projects bring in ideas and concepts and test them in these analog simulation environments like the Mars Desert Research Station and even even recently the NASA funded Hawaii Space Exploration Analog Simulation there, the High Seas Project. And a lot of these analog environments is vital.

And it's a place where we can not only test technology, but also the psychological aspects, the human factors, the human behavior. Because to me, I see there are a lot of challenges for humans to to survive in space in extreme environments like space but I think one of the most limiting factors for humans to survive in space and colonize an off-world planet like Mars is the human the human psychology aspect. Tell me about this organization which you helped to found theSC, what does that stand for? The ISSC stands for the International Space Surgery Consortium. This is an international group of surgeons and anesthesiologists and space medicine doctors that are very, very much interested in developing standard operational procedures,

developing procedures and protocols to enable astronauts to survive in space. When one day you can see humans in space, there's going to be a high risk of injuries and even medical conditions like appendicitis or dental issues, right? What are the tools and what are the knowledge skills of the crew that will be able to address these challenges? Or what if there's a life-threatening incident, then how do we address this? So this is what we're trying to do at ISSC, is that we're trying to collaborate to work on developing these surgical procedures, medical conditions that we can address, and then teach and educate astronaut crews.

And for me, it's to work with the new nascent industry, the commercial astronauts, the pioneers, the visionaries, the shakers in opening up the new space, the commercial space. And these individuals will supply the services and the consults to be able to offer their expertise for the commercial area. So when you mentioned dental challenges, did you all see the movie Castaway, Tom Hanks? Yes, we did. With the world's worst toothache? Yes, yes. We're talking about dealing with humans, right? Astronauts and humans, right?

We have not adapted physiologically, to live long duration in in these environments microgravity or even eventually going into long missions deep space missions to an off world planet these are very important problems and challenges that we need to address and that's why i think analog environments on the terrestrial analog environments are really important to conduct and to have individuals train through those environments and learn and understand what it is, the challenges first of all, and then find solutions to them. I want to bring one more person into this conversation, someone with extensive experience in some of the most extreme environments that our home world offers.

As far as I know, he's also the only person with us today who actually owns a piece or two of Mars. Jeff Nocken hosted the award-winning television adventure series, Meteorite Men, for the Discovery Network science channel. But you've probably seen him on nearly every other major media outlet. He also works with some of our planet's most distinguished museums, sharing his love of space rocks and science. His company, Aerolite Meteorites, sells space rocks and shares his lifelong love of these interplanetary voyagers

and the science that they represent. He's also a photographer, a writer, and right over here are his two books. There's one, Rockstar, Adventures of a Meteorite Man, which I can recommend very highly. It's a great read. And this one, which came first, right, Meteorite Hunting, How to Find Treasure from Space. Pretty cool stuff.

He's also a designer and a recovering punk rocker. Please welcome Jeff Notkin. Thank you, Matt. It's great to work with you again. And let me say there is no full recovery from punk rock, but we do the best that we can. You know, the first thing that came to mind after Susan's extraordinary introduction that you gave her and her many credits is,

I wish I'd had you on some of our expeditions to some of these scary places. You sound like you have exactly the kind of expertise we need to keep my guys in one piece. Well, I was a rock singer so maybe there was something. We've got two rockers here. Charles and I are the outsiders, unfortunately. We'll come to your concert. Listen, Bill Nye and I met

you last year. It was in Flagstaff, the Planetary Defense Conference, which was probably the most fun I've ever had talking about worldwide Armageddon. And we were on stage with you. A lot of very enthusiastic people who care deeply about this stuff. But my boss,

Bill Nye, thinks that living on Mars, at least in the foreseeable future, is a delightful fantasy. A couple of weeks ago, my guest on the show, a guy named Neil deGrasse Tyson, said that he can see it as a nice place to vacation but not a place to live.

At least two of you here, you've spent time in some of these extreme environments. I'm thinking of the section in your book, your first trip to the Atacama Desert, where you might have ended up out there as a fossil if you hadn't gotten that truck out of the sand. Indeed. Actually, perhaps mummy would be more accurate than fossil. There were several very close calls. And I think when you're operating in environments that are this harsh and this difficult, potentially hazardous, you really have to try and prepare for every possible eventuality.

And it doesn't matter, because there will always be something else that goes wrong. As Douglas Adams said in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, expect the unexpected. And we had the best vehicles, the best survival equipment. And you'll recall this passage in Rockstar where we're driving our four-wheel drive vehicles across just hard, flat, desert pan, desert, looking for meteorites. And our truck just sank into a pit of talcum powder fine sand right up to the axles. And you can't really predict that sort of thing. And I've spent several months in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, on multiple expeditions. And you do feel like you're in an alien world.

And you can see why Nomad was tested there, why Fido was tested there. When you're out hiking across that wasteland with the low rolling hills and the red sand and the broken rocks and absolutely nothing else, no cacti, no insects, no reptiles, with a little exercising of the imagination you could put yourself on Mars. And it's a very exciting experience. And it's also a bit worrying. And I think one of the things we have to think about with our astronauts and our colonists, who will hopefully eventually take this trip before too long, is that they should be prepared psychologically for the shocking devastation that exists out there.

And for a few days, I found it amazing. I go, well, look, there's not anyone. You couldn't see a car. There were no telegraph poles. There aren't even aircraft that fly over. It is that remote. And after time, it can become disturbing. And there are some people who have been on the ANSMET meteorite recovery expeditions to Antarctica

who have experienced depression and negative reactions because of the desolation and the sameness of the environment. and negative reactions because of the desolation and the sameness of the environment. So I entirely agree with Susan that perhaps giving these colonists and future astronauts the opportunity to experience these environments, similar environments here on Earth before they go, even if that maybe means building similar temporary Mars bases. Habitats. Yes, and operating, practicing, using spacesuits in that environment. Because that's a difficult terrain to climb over.

And no matter how careful you are, you'll take a fall now and then you get flat tires. Things go wrong. And falling here when you're hunting for space rocks is one thing. Falling on Mars in a spacesuit, in a pressure suit, could be a completely different experience. Yeah, I've fallen and I can't get up. Susan, you've been nodding enthusiastically throughout this because you've done a lot of this. You lived in a habitat. Yeah, absolutely.

And so I totally concur with the ideas. In fact, that is something that we are planning in our long-term vision with the ISSC is to expand the project into the space clinic. see is to expand the project into the space clinic so our sort of plan and vision is to actually provide that service to be able to train astronauts here on earth put them through these base camps these colonies that really is like a simulation of an off-world planet like mars and they live through it through they live there as a group, as a colony. It's really testing their psychological as well as the medical technology. But the psychological is more important. Put them there for maybe a year or two years continuously. That, I think, is sort of like preparatory before you even put humans into long-duration missions.

Haven't you also simulated serious injuries during these analog Martian missions? Well, yes. Part of our mission simulation at MDRS in January was that we did search and rescue operations kind of like taking battlefield medicine and taking aspects of that and now modifying it for space for astronauts in that microgravity condition. So we actually did do several scenarios where we did search evas you know had a real serious life-threatening condition and how do we do medical triage there and then evacuate that in astronaut back to the hab and

you know and then do the medical intervention that was interesting. But what was not planned was myself actually having an injury. I literally did have an injury when I was doing that two-week simulation where I fell off the ATV. I really banged my head and smashed my helmet. I had a concussion. And I was the medical officer. And so crew they were none of them had they had very minimum medical skills and thank goodness you know obviously we had mission control we had a remote mission control support and there's a full you know group of flight surgeons qualified board certified flight surgeons that had to help me go through my own medical assessment and that was interesting because you know that wasn't planned and it literally happened. And thank goodness, you know, I didn't have serious injuries,

injuries, even here in simulations. And it's expected. That's MD and space medicine researcher Susan Jewell at the International Space Development Conference. Susan, JPL's Charles Wetzel, and meteorite man Jeff Notkin have more to tell us about living on Mars. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more.

It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Your name carried to an asteroid! How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list.

The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, continuing a special edition of the show recorded at the busy International Space Development Conference on Saturday, May 17th. My guests for a conversation about living and working on Mars were Charles Wetzel, manager of the Mars Program Formulation Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, doctor of medicine and space medicine researcher Susan Jewell, and author, science enthusiast, meteorite man Jeff Notkin.

We were talking about what happens when someone gets hurt on Mars or in deep space far, far away from the nearest hospital. Charles, first of all, JPL needs to start developing that emergency medical hologram that was on Star Trek Voyager. Absolutely. From what you're hearing, I mean, here are two people who have been in these extreme environments. Susan has lived in it and made it as close to a Mars experience as possible. But you can't really duplicate how extreme that environment is, can you?

No, I would agree. It's going to be really difficult to do that here on the surface of the Earth. You know, the training and the thought process that goes into that, I don't even know where to start about getting humans ready for that sort of thing. It was interesting, though, listening to this discussion, and also we make this distinction between colonizing Mars versus exploring or having expeditions to Mars. I've just come back from this week we've had a workshop back in the DC area looking at future landing sites for Mars and there's always this this tension between the scientists and the

engineers and the scientists were like oh these are the most scientifically compelling look at this site look at these things and the engineers say we have were like, oh, these are the most scientifically compelling. Look at this site. Look at these things. And the engineers say, we have a name for that kind of site. It's called a hazard. Right. And and and even this morning or, you know, earlier today at the at the conference, you have the people that are talking about institute resource utilization, going places on Mars where you could imagine growing crops or you could imagine digging under and getting the ice and stuff like that. And I started thinking about reversing that problem and saying, okay, well, imagine we're on Mars planning the first missions to come and explore Earth, right? And you've got a choice between going to the fertile Sacramento Valley or going to the oil fields in Texas, you know, where there's a lot of resources and you could imagine colonizing

for a long period of time. And you say, would I rather do that or would I rather be sending the first missions to places like Everest in the Himalayas, like to the Grand Canyon to understand the geology, like to the Olduvai Gorges and understand, you know, the origins of human life on Mars. And those are really going to be interesting contrasts where people try and balance that safety versus excitement in the first human missions to Mars. And also the questions of resources versus extreme environments and extreme places to go. And so there's some choices that lie ahead as we think about sending the first humans out there. I think a lot of it is because of my background in medicine. I always put safety first.

When you're talking about humans, you have to put safety as the first priority. But I think with the help of robotics and robots going first, being precursor humans, and where technology is currently really, I mean, just amazing stuff happening out there, like 3D printing, the work that telemedicine, where that's going. I think that will help us to be able to find the ways to get humans safely to live and work in space. But definitely, I think the first priority when it comes to humans, you have to look at safety. Safety is number one.

I wanted to comment on what Charles said. I just thought that that was brilliant that you've turned this problem around and imagined, okay, we're Martians. Look at this really strange blue-green planet. Let's send our first probe there. It's got all that poisonous oxygen. I know. Well, it's probably the bacteria that will kill us at the end of the movie.

It's all poisonous here. It's in areas on Earth. It's just so hot there. How could anything live in an environment that hot? But when you were relating this idea, concept of yours i thought oh if i was on mars the place i'd want to land is the grand canyon you know the scientific the the explorer in us goes well i want to you know i want to see the biggest volcano i want to see the most amazing geologic features but your point is so well taken let's get them there first and make sure they're safe, they've got some water

they've got an environment that's not too hostile, then later we can send out the robots and drones and probes and who knows what we'll have by then that can get out and scout for us Was I right when I said that you own a piece or two of Mars? I do, I own several pieces of Mars and several

pieces of the moon. So we know Susan is ready to go, if you could be the first of Mars and several pieces of the moon. So we know Susan is ready to go. If you could be the first meteorite hunter, none of the competition has reached there yet, and get at all those pristine meteorites, would you make the trip? Absolutely, with one condition, and that's that I could take my cat, because she's very possessive and she would be really annoyed at me. She's already annoyed enough after a month in the Atacama when I come back. But, I mean, really, the image of those meteorites lying on the surface on Mars.

And they're different from meteorites here because the atmosphere is different. So the ablation is different. That's what I was going to say. I'm going to sound really arrogant here. But he can't be the first meteorite hunter on Mars, right? Because we've actually already found some with the robots. Well, how about the first autonomous human meteorite? Okay, fair enough.

But of course, we give that honor to the rover. And I mean, I must have been as thrilled as anyone on the planet to see that. Because I've spent my professional career recovering meteorites on Earth. And we know in our minds that there are meteorites on other worlds. Because we've seen the craters. But you look and you go, well, there's a meteorite on another planet exactly that is just mind-bending and of course the day that photograph was released you can imagine how many tweets and emails and messages i got jeff are you going to mars are you going to mars have you left for mars yet are you going to mars you're going to bring

that meteorite back we you know we you're absolutely resonate with that right we should not have been shocked by that and yet yet so many people were, right? It's totally what you would have expected, but somehow nobody was expecting it. It was just like, oh my goodness. And it brings it home, right, about it's another planet. It's just like this planet, and it has all of the same, a lot of the same characteristics that we have here. A lot of the same processes are happening and things like that. But it's just, every time something like that happens, it makes it so much easier to visualize people being there and doing those sort of things, having those sort of things happening in their lives. That is the education

of the public to really understand that we are not separated from the cosmos. We are part of the cosmos. We are part of this big universe, right? So Mars and Earth is just a small little minute bit of this whole galaxy that's out there in this universe. And I think it's a challenge to be able to re-educate people to say not, you know, we're separated.

And I think if we can break that barrier, change that mindset, change that perspective, I think then we're more open for humans to really think about, yes, humans can become a multi-planetary species. I think until we really break that barrier and re-educate people, you're always going to get the naysayers,

the people that's going to stop, visionaries and pioneers and people like myself that really want to go and move us forward, move us outwards. And I bet the other three of us here could not agree with you more about the importance of getting that message out there, which is part of what we're doing right now with this program. Jeff, I am so glad you brought up your cat. Upstairs here, one of the original Martians, Robert Zubrin was talking as he often does about how we're

going to get there and how we're going to live there and part of his talk was about agriculture now you're going to have to deal with the fact that the soil itself on mars right charles is not going to be too friendly right to uh you know planting orange trees and carrots assuming you can deal with that one of the other things he talked about is, you know, what are we going to eat? And he said he expects the first settlers are going to be vegetarians or largely so, which, Jeff, I don't think

you'd have a problem with. I would not. I've been a vegetarian for about 25 years. But you'll be pleased that I'm not one of those preachy vegetarians. This is a political choice that I made many years ago. Yeah, we're not going to be able to take livestock to Mars. Oh, no, he said we might. He was talking about chickens and rabbits.

He said no goats because goats will eat your dome. Well, and they're a bit smelly too. Imagine having a small herd of goats in your spaceship for the long journey to Mars. It would probably get a little rank in there over time. You could harvest the methane though. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah, our first goat-powered spaceship. See, we're pushing the frontiers of science every day.

So pushing the frontiers of science and talking about food and food for space. No, we're not going to bring livestock up there. And no, you know, we've got to think out of the box. Stem cell. Out there now already a laboratory scientist in England, I think they're from England, where they actually made hamburgers from stem cell meat. So you don't need to bring livestock. You maybe don't even have to bring soil to make vegetables

because there is another research team out there that's literally looking at growing vegetables without soil. This is technology. Only thinking out of the box are we really truly able to one day have humans on another world, another planet. Do you remember in your presentation here at ISDC talking about how thrilled you were because eventually you grew some food and you were able to eat what? Oh, my gosh, yes. So during this two-week simulation, we ate dried food, dehydrated food constantly every day. But we had a little green hub, of course, experimenting growing food and vegetables. And during that week and a half, we managed to grow a lettuce and so we all fought for a piece of lettuce and it was great i have to tell

you because dehydrated food just tastes like paper it's our first lettuce it's our kid so so yes as humans until we become cyborgs or something um you know taste is important, and aesthetics of food, really eating food, real food, right? Charles, the Mars One mission, the one that is hoping fairly soon to send some colonists to Mars on a one-way trip. Publicity stunt? Is it a realistic goal? publicity stunt? Is it a realistic goal? I don't know enough about either their financing or their technology base to really say much about it other than I would be shocked if they really can come up with enough money to undertake something like this. Maybe it's not out of the question, but it seems like that's a pretty major endeavor for something that, as far as I know, they're talking about things like crowdsourcing or maybe sponsorship type arrangements. Reality television, right.

When people misbehave on the ship on the way to Mars, do they just get voted out of the airlock? That's a pretty harsh show, but I tell you, it would get killer ratings. I wanted to talk about two things. One about the holodeck in a minute, what you mentioned earlier on. I don't endorse anything that puts humans at risk. Anything to do with reality show and then combining with something as dangerous as space exploration, putting humans in space

and making it into an entertainment reality show is totally wrong. I think there's ethical issues, there's moral issues, just the idea that you might even see someone die on the spot and that would just be horrendous because you're just taking something really serious and making it very trivial

and I don't endorse that and I think a lot of people in the professional communities doctors and scientists and researchers, spend all their lives trying to do what they do to enable us to develop capabilities, technologies to enable humans to go to space. And then you have somebody come out and say, well, make a reality show. I think there's just something intrinsically wrong with that.

But I want to talk also about what you said about the holodeck. In fact, that's what we're going to be doing. We're working for our next mission, analog mission. We're working with a company that actually is developing the 3D holographic avatar. And that is kind of like a precursor

for what you see, the Star Trek Next Generation, the holodeck. That is sort of like the mid-future plan is to develop the holodeck but right now we're working with them to develop this space surgeon avatar and the space spiritual avatar to bring into our next mission because what we found in this simulation in january was that when we did do the simulation when we did operate we lost communication with the mission control center.

Thank goodness it was a simulation mannequin, not a real human being. But we were all standing there. And remember, these crew members assisted me. They had no medical knowledge at all, any medical skills. In a real situation, that person would have died on the operating table, right? The idea is we'll use the avatars, the 3D holographic avatar of this avatar surgeon to be able to come on board. We compress the program just like you see in Star Trek. This is happening in reality. And then they will guide us through the operation. Now, what's interesting about what they're doing is that they're even going deeper, integrating artificial intelligence

into this avatar as well as artificial empathy. So these avatars really can interact with you. They can interact with you. They can recognize your gesture. They recognize your behavior, your posture, your stance. And they can even anticipate what you're going to ask them. We're almost out of time. And Charles, I want to throw a very important question to you. But first, out of fairness,

because we talked about reality television, we have only one reality television star here. But I remember you... I do adventure television, not reality. Adventure, sorry. I'm down on reality television. We have only one reality television star here. But I remember you... I do adventure television, not reality. Adventure, sorry. I'm down on reality television. Well, and I also remember talking to you backstage at the Planetary Defense Conference about your fight to try and make sure that there was as much science as reality TV elements in the show that you did.

And it was a long road with Meteorite Men. And let me say that I love working with Science Channel, and they were really good to us, and they're one of the few networks in this country that actually does educational programming. But ultimately, they have to attract advertisers, and making a show like Meteorite Men, where we traveled to four different continents

in 11 countries, hundreds of thousands of miles, with a crew of 14 people, that's a lot of money you need to make that. And so there is a tightrope that you walk, and on one side, there's the science and the education and the inspiration. On the other, it's the treasure hunt and, well, how much is this rock worth? And so we tried to balance some fairly sophisticated scientific content with an explanation that meteorites are valuable to the scientific community and to collectors.

And yes, it's a little black rock, but on the collector's market, it's worth $1,000. Why? So I'm a passionate collector and researcher, and I own a commercial meteorite company because I need money to fund expeditions. No bucks, no Buck Rogers, as was immortalized in the right stuff. And I take all of this very seriously. And my current show is called STEM Journals, and my client is Cox Media. And this show is aimed very specifically at bright young students who are interested in STEM-related fields. And after spending years and hundreds of thousands of miles explaining meteorites, I'm now exposing our audience to archaeology and astronomy

and biomechanics and nanotech and so many different disciplines. This has been a really enlightening experience for me because I've had to immerse myself in scientific disciplines that I wasn't previously familiar with. So I don't want Susan to think that I'm a reality TV hack. Don't worry, you're in good company here at the International Space Development Conference. All right, Charles, as your robots become ever more capable and intelligent and autonomous, how important is it that we someday put humans on Mars, on the red planet?

I still think it's very important. I think we just have to realize we're doing it for different reasons, right? I find myself often being put in this place of saying, well, it's robots versus humans, and it's not an either-or proposition. There's things that robots are better at. There's things that humans are better at, and the best way to do it is hand-in-hand and do those things together. But in terms of some of the pure science things things we understand what we can and can't do with

robots we understand how long it'll take us to do different things and if if that's the path we're on we're going to keep doing as much as we can with robots for as long as we can with robots but sending humans into space is every bit as compelling every bit as exciting certainly engaging people there's something just visceral about the need for humans to be the explorers and to go out there and do those things. And so that's kind of how I see us going forward together. Susan, other than just you personally wanting to go, why should there be humans on Mars? I think it's what I always call cosmic divinity. I think in a way it's kind of like an intrinsic part of us as a human race. This curiosity and this fascination about the unknown,

you know, the X factor in the equation of life. We want to discover it, whatever it is. And there's also something very much deeper, this connection with the bigger picture, the universe that we want to be part of, we are part of. In a way, it's kind of like ET, like going home. It kind of is, because we're all made of really cosmic dust, right? Really, if you really look at it. Stardust. Stardust, exactly. So that is our home. This is our home. Earth is our home, but that is our home too so this deep intrinsic

drive for us as a human species to really reconnect to go out and to explore is part of what we want to do and what we really have to do because you know there's a finite time on planet earth we need to become a multi-planetary species for many reasons. I do believe in 50 to 100 years, if we were to listen to your program again, you know, in this particular program episode, they're going to go, you know, why are they even asking that question? I hope you're right.

Jeff, the third of our explorers here, why should humans go? Because last week I had breakfast with Fred Hayes from Apollo 13. And I spent half an hour with Gene Cernan talking about the beautiful new documentary film Last Man on the Moon, which every space flight enthusiast must see. It's a beautiful, beautiful moving film. It's the human experience. What we're doing with robotic missions is fantastic and amazing and brilliant, and we must continue to do it. But talking to someone who's been there, seeing the mission, hearing about the experience from the astronauts themselves can never be replaced.

And for all the amazing things that we've done with robots, when we look back at the Apollo missions, those events, that journey made us as humans bigger than we were before. It's the biggest thing we've ever done. And I think it unites the people of Earth. And I think it gives us something to strive for that we can become better than we are. And for me, putting humans into space and going where no one has gone before is the greatest mission of all. And I think it's both. We need robots and we need human spaceflight. Charles, what should we be looking for next from JPL on Mars?

We've got two missions working down the pipeline. The first one in 2016, the InSight mission, is just passed their critical design review in the last few weeks. That's a geophysics mission. It's going to carry seismometers and heat probes and really understand more about planetary formations. It's coming out of the Discovery mission program, which is more planetary science writ large.

So it's using Mars as the target of observation, but that's the next mission out of the queue. The Mars 2020 mission is based on the engineering hardware from Curiosity, the landing system, and the rover. I can't say anything about the science and the payload because we're in the middle of evaluating all those payload proposals and a lot of great ideas about the science investigations to be done and how to pick great rocks to sample on the surface of Mars. But as soon as we come out of that blackout period, I'm sure there'll be people that'll be happy to talk with you about that later on this summer.

I look forward to that, and we'll follow that program as we always have on this show. Susan, what's coming next for you? Yes, a lot of things. I think for me it's the upcoming Mars Without Borders team of analog astronauts, our next expedition at the Mars Desert Research Station. I'm also shortlisted for the NASA High Seas. These are the longer duration

missions. And hopefully, crossing my fingers that they can find the funding, I'm one of the finalists for the Flashlight Mars Arctic Research Station. This is a year-long mission. So, let's see what happens. But I'm looking forward to it.

She's one heck of an adventurer, isn't she? Takes one to know one, I guess. When you mentioned being locked in a habitat and not being allowed to leave for one or two years, the first thing I thought of was British boarding school. But we probably won't go there. I went to one. Oh, you have that in common as well.

So I'm halfway through Season three of STEM Journals, and upcoming episodes, we believe, will include paleontology, acoustics, and aerospace. And I am working on my third book, which will be a collection of essays about my life in science and adventuring and probably a few television stories thrown in. And hopefully bigger, better, and stranger space rocks in the future.

Whenever garbage falls from the sky, I'm ready to clean it up. It's just my service to humanity. Thank you, folks. We have been talking with Mars explorer and engineer Charles Wetzel of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with space medicine pioneer Susan Jewell, Dr. Susan Jewell, and the meteorite man, Jeff Notkin. Our thanks also go to the National Space Society,

producer of the 33rd International Space Development Conference, led by ISDC Chair Pat Montour and Co-Chairs Nicola Sarsiamati and John Spencer. We're also grateful to Mike Cobran for his support. Bruce Betts and this week's edition of What's Up are next. Stay with us. It is time to talk to the Planetary Society's Director

of Science and Technology, that's Bruce Betts, who I'm sorry to say, Guy, that you weren't able to join us for ISDC. It was fun. Good. I'm glad you enjoyed it and sorry I missed it. You know, you had to be preparing to tell us about the night sky. So what do we have to look up to? Exactly. That's all I've been doing for days and days.

What you have to maybe look up to is a possible new meteor shower or even meteor storm with hundreds or even thousands of meteors per hour. Probably not, but maybe. So here's the deal. On May 24th, Saturday early morning, so the evening that's Friday night, Saturday morning, the Earth will cross through debris from the small comet P209 Linear. Now, this comet got perturbed in its orbit, got changed and tweaked by a pass a little too close to Jupiter a couple years ago, and that's why now there's an orbital debris train, which we're crossing into. But it's almost anyone's guess how much stuff we'll actually

run into. So it could range from ones of meteors, tens of meteors, hundreds, or maybe thousands. It favors North America. And so you might want to give it a shot early, early Saturday morning. It sounds like a gamble worth taking. Then there's our usual crowd, quite reliable, less spectacular in some ways, but some ways just as spectacular. We've got Jupiter in the evening sky over in the west. We've got Mars up in the south looking reddish, Saturn over farther to the east, and in the pre-dawn still Venus. And you may even be able to catch Mercury in the early after sunset low in the west. We move on to this week in space history. Hard to believe it, but it was already 2008,

looking back six years ago, that Phoenix landed on Mars and began its successful Mars surface mission. Before you go in to random space fact, I have to admit an error, which I don't know if you discovered, but I bet a lot of people in the audience wondered why we said Tom Jones was our celebrity Random Space Fact introducer and he didn't show up. Well, that was my fault. I forgot to stick his voice in there. So sorry about that. So here, for real, is Tom Jones, the astronaut. Hi, Bruce. It's planetary scientist and astronaut Tom Jones, and I think it's about time for a random space fact. All right, Tom. Sorry about that.

Yay. Did you know, Matt, they're estimated to be seven times ten to the 22nd stars in the universe? That's 70 sextillion stars in the universe, and I've counted about half of them. That's good. That is not true. It is not an exact number either, but that does give you the scale of, hey, there are a lot of stars in the universe.

Yeah, there really are. And I was ready to believe that you had counted half of them, and that's why you weren't at ISTC. Yes, I was also doing that. By the way, this is to be contrasted with seeing only a few thousand stars in the night sky with the naked eye even from the darkest sight. So we not surprisingly see just a wee bit of a tiny fraction. All right, we go on to the trivia contest. Measured across the Earth's surface, how far did Alan Shepard travel in Freedom 7, the first American in space suborbital flight? How'd we do, Matt? kit, this electronics kit. This particular one developed in cooperation with NASA. It's been seen on TED. It's really pretty fun. I've got one here that I think I still have to send to Bill Nye. We'll see when I get around to that. It's really too much fun. Our winner. Okay, folks, don't come

down on me for this. This is random.org, and he is no relation. I can't help how this came out. Our winner is David Kaplan of West Simsbury, Connecticut. I was afraid you were going to say that Matt Kaplan was the winner, so that doesn't seem nearly as bad. He is absolutely not a relation. He's just a faithful, good listener. And his number came up. So, David, you're're gonna get the little bits kit and uh you know stay tuned we're not going to give away one this week but we might just have another

pretty soon so there will be another opportunity and we won't let david win how's that okay and by the way it was uh according to most people about 30, 303 miles that Alan Shepard traveled downrange, more than twice as far as he went up. Indeed. 486 kilometers. So not that far. Yeah. From Southern California doesn't even get us up to my hometown of Sacramento. All right. Let's move on to the next trivia contest question. We in the Milky Way galaxy are part of what's called the local group of galaxies. Two biggest galaxies by far are the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy. What is the

third largest galaxy in the local group? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. You have until the 27th. That would be Tuesday, May 27th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. I don't know the answer. I only know that the local group rules. Local group rules! Alright, everybody, go out there, look up

at the night sky and think about if you were king of something, what would it be? Thank you and good night why the local group of course why stop there today the local group tomorrow the multiverse he's bruce betts the director of science and technology for the planetary society who joins us every week here for what's up planetary radio is produced by the planetaryary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by the Ready for Mars members of the Society.

Clear pink skies.