Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Looking Back at the Phoenix Mars Polar Lander With Peter Smith

Episode Date: January 5, 2009

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A Phoenix Lander Postmortem with Peter Smith, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Can you really call it a post-mortem when gigabytes of data are waiting for review and when there's still a slight chance that Phoenix will reawaken in the Martian spring? Those are just a couple of the topics

we'll cover with Principal Investigator Peter Smith in a couple of minutes. Emily Lakdawalla will also take us to the Red Planet for this week's Q&A segment, and Bruce Betts will take a glance at the night sky just before he lays out a new space trivia contest. You might think we have a one-track mind this week. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's two tracks, if you please, and they're still being left in the Martian dirt by spirit and opportunity. There's a new and very thorough Mars Exploration Rover update at planetary.org. Bill Nye will share news about a celebration of the rover's fifth anniversary in just a few seconds.

Have no fear, there's plenty of other news from around our interplanetary neighborhood in Emily's blog, also at planetary.org. I'll be right back with Peter Smith. Here's the science guy. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of the Planetary Society. And coming up on the 14th of January, 2009, happy new year, by the way, Jim Bell and I are going to talk with everybody at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, which is on 70 North Mentor Avenue in Pasadena. Dr. Bell and I are going to talk about the five year anniversary of the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers on Mars. Now understand that for me, this goes back to when I was in college at Cornell University, and I had Carl Sagan telling us, telling his students about Mars.

And then the Viking spacecrafts landed on Mars. My friends, these two rovers work so well that instead of running for three months, they've been running for five years. And Dr. Bell is the guy in charge of the panoramic cameras, years. And Dr. Bell is the guy in charge of the panoramic cameras, the camera that takes the spectacular images that he published in his book, Postcards from Mars. And this is a time to really understand why our exploration of Mars is changing the world, the world here on Earth. Dr. Bell is among the world's foremost authorities on this stuff. And you can sit in this theater right there in Pasadena and talk it over with him. He'll talk about the water on Mars. He'll talk

about the rocks on Mars. He'll talk about the ice on Mars. He'll talk about the sky. And you know, we will, of course, mention briefly the two Mars dials, the sundials, which are driving around with the rovers. You'll be face to face with a guy who knows more about taking pictures on Mars than anybody. It's a very exciting week. Hope to see you on the 14th, and once again, Happy New Year. This is Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. There's more information about our January 14 celebration of the rovers at planetary.org. Can't make it to Pasadena that evening? Stay tuned.

We'll have some highlights for you in a few weeks. If it's not entirely dead, the Phoenix Polar Lander is at minimum fast asleep under what may be meters of Martian ice. Were you with us last May when we celebrated the spacecraft's landing with Peter Smith? The mission's principal investigator got a standing ovation at the Planetary Society's big landing party when he drove over from the Jet Propulsion Lab. But the operations phase of the mission was just getting underway. Five months later, Phoenix had accomplished almost everything it had set out to do

and uncovered some surprises along the way. I called Peter at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab a few days ago. He provided an all-too-brief review of the mission. Peter, congratulations on a successful run by the Phoenix Lander, and welcome back to Planetary Radio. Well, thank you, Matt. It's a pleasure to be on your show. There is so much that we could talk about here, so much that this mission did in the relatively short time that it had on the planet Mars, although two months longer than many people expected. I know we're not going to cover all of it. We have a great summary article at Planetary.org by my colleague, AJS Rail, and then, of course,

there is your website that we'll also connect to from Planetary.org slash radio. But let's cover a little bit of territory here. First of all, tell me what surprised you most about this polar region of the red planet? Well, frankly, the thing that surprised me most was a totally unexpected discovery of perchlorate in the soil. And like many people, I had to look up perchlorate in Wikipedia to figure out what the heck it was. Our chemists were saying, my gosh, it's as high as 1% of the soil is this odd chemical. my gosh, it's as high as 1% of the soil is this odd chemical.

And perchlorate, it turns out, on the Earth is only found in the extreme hyper-dry regions of the Earth, and that would be like the high-altitude desert in Chile called the Atacama. And it's only found there because it's so soluble in water that when it rains, it washes perchlorate away. So interesting stuff, and it has all kinds of properties. Actually, microbes live on it. It's used for rocket fuel. It's a bit of a hazard for humans if it gets in the drinking water. So a very interesting discovery. It has all kinds of ramifications, just exactly the kind of unexpected result that we're hoping

for. exactly the kind of unexpected result that we're hoping for. You wrote fairly recently that what we may be looking at is really a very dry, cold season on Mars that could change. That's exactly right. We know very clearly that the Martian spin axis is not stable like the Earth is. And over time, and I'm talking hundreds of thousands of years, the spin axis changes its tilt with respect to the orbital plane. And as it tilts more towards the sun,

when it exceeds what we think of as a tipping point, if you like, at about 30 degrees, now it's at 25, so it's well inside of 30 degrees. At 30 degrees, the polar cap becomes unstable and starts to release its water into the atmosphere, and it becomes a much wetter polar environment. So it's at those times that we're investigating the possibility of a habitable zone in the polar regions. What is the data that you've analyzed so far? How has it made you change your thinking, if it has at all, about the chance of life or our past life on Mars?

Well, it all depends on liquid water. And we, of course, were able to reveal ice near the surface and prove that it was water ice. But water ice alone is not enough for a habitable zone. And then as we track the weather throughout the summer and into the fall on Mars, we realized that the models that were describing Martian weather, the global circulation models, are actually inaccurate. They weren't predicting what we were seeing in terms of snowfall and water vapor freezing down to the surface every night. All these things were not in the models.

What I think the Phoenix mission is going to be able to do is get the models accurate as far as our landing site is concerned, and then track it back in time. And I think we may see a very different result as we go back in time than people have seen in the past with models that are inaccurate. When I said that this mission is really not over, just maybe the life of the spacecraft, is that how you look at it? Yes. You know, we spend an awful lot of time with our small team doing the operations phase, and we just stopped that in about the first week of November.

That's the first time, really, that we've been able to focus on analyzing our data. And the first thing is to kind of pick the low-hanging fruit and publish those papers. And we're in the process of getting our science articles put together. Probably in another couple weeks they'll be submitted. And then we get to do the detailed analysis of kind of the subtler, more difficult to understand portions of our data set. And those are the portions that are going to tell us about organics, about the carbonate story, and really unfold some of the interesting details that we're just not quite sure about right now. I wouldn't ask any good scientist to tip their hand

about papers that have not yet been published, but are we going to be seeing some surprises? Well, most of what we're going to be publishing is released at the recent American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, so I don't think you'll see any huge surprises that haven't been released to date, not in these first articles. I think it's in the second set of articles that we'll have surprises. What's it going to take to determine whether there were organics present at this site? Has that been a more difficult search than you might have expected? Yes, because the organics

would be seen in our oven experiment. It's called TIGA, the thermal and involved gas analyzer. And this instrument, of course, slowly heats up the minerals in the soil. You put a sample of soil into one of the ovens, slowly heats it up, and you watch the gases being released. Now, wouldn't you know it, but this perchlorate discovery is a very powerful oxidizer. And it's very stable at room temperature and below, cold temperatures, which is what we have on Mars but as you heat it up it releases its oxygen which causes organics to combust in other words you you burn up the organics as you're trying to measure them and when that happens you would see a carbon dioxide release which is you know a major component of organic material is carbon

you add oxygen it combusts the carbon dioxide is released. So we see this release of carbon dioxide, but it could also be a carbonate, for gosh sake. That organic material could do the same sort of thing. So it's only when we do the laboratory work and look at the exact signatures with different types of either organics or carbonates that we're going to be able to unravel this story.

The ice. We knew it was there. I mean, we'd seen ice from high above, of course, but you guys were the first to touch it. Well, it's not quite true that we saw ice except in the exposed ice cap. What we saw was hydrogen. Of course, hydrogen is in its most common form with water, but it wasn't a certainty. So we were following up on this measurement of hydrogen in the northern plains, which we thought would be ice, and we thought it would be at a certain depth under the surface. And we were able to verify that not only is it regionally available, but even at our actual landing site where we just touched down kind of almost at random within our landing ellipse, there was ice right under us.

The thrusters blew the surface materials off. We could see it right away. Yeah, that was a wonderful surprise. We're not done with that Martian ice, the Phoenix mission, or its principal investigator, Peter Smith. Planetary Radio continues in one minute. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society

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planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Our guest is the University of Arizona's Peter Smith, the man most responsible for getting the Phoenix lander to the Arctic Circle of Mars. The Lunar and Planetary Lab senior research scientist has had a piece of many other missions to the red planet, including Pathfinder and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. His work as principal investigator is likely to continue for years and will include further analysis of the ice that Phoenix found literally beneath its feet.

And I guess this ice, was it surprising in other ways as well? I mean, I think I read someplace that you found a couple of different kinds of ice. Well, yes. You know, our robotic arm is only 8 feet long, or 7 1⁄2 to be accurate. It can reach maybe over a 100-degree angle, and so we only have a few square feet that we can access with the robotic arm. And we saw two different expressions of ice, one a very white layer that looked like pure ice, and another hole we saw what looked like a very dust-rich ice mixture that looked very much like the soil, but it was extremely hard, of course.

So right there within the reach of our arm were two different types of expression of water ice. There's another kind of ice that made me think of you guys when my family got together for its annual viewing of White Christmas this year, and that was snow. Yes. Oh, we were very surprised to see snow. And our LIDAR, which is a laser beam that we shine straight up above the lander, and we look at the reflections off of cloud layers, showed us the bottoms of clouds.

For the first, I think, three months, we saw just dust coming by. Dust, dust, dust, no water clouds at all. Then after 90 falls, or 90 Martian days, we started to see water ice clouds. And then I think it was like 100 days into the mission, you could tell that there were streamers coming out the bottom of these clouds, and on the Earth those would be water ice crystals coming down, and we were able to prove that that's what it was. And eventually we actually saw them coming all the way down to the surface.

So it was snowing to the surface. I wonder if maybe you had the simplest scientific experiment ever On a probe to land on another planet The little telltale, that little weather vane Which was really, in many ways, charming to watch Yes, you could see very directly that the wind is blowing And in what direction And the little mirror that's part of this telltale In other words, it's just a little ribbon that is blown that the wind is blowing and in what direction. And the little mirror that's part of this telltale,

in other words, it's just a little ribbon that is blown by the wind, and it has a mirror under it so you can look straight up from the bottom of the ribbon and actually get a more accurate depiction of which way it's blowing. And that had frost on it some days, so we were seeing ice on the mirror and we were seeing the winds blowing. We even think we saw a dust devil come by because all of a sudden the thing was at right angles just for a very short period of time. So clearly some sort of wind tornado or dust devil came by. Did you see the

little goofy thing that somebody had done about different weather conditions on Mars and finally getting to one where, I don't know if it said there was a dust devil or the winds were high enough, but your telltale was gone, torn off. Yes, I know. There's all kinds of funny jokes about our telltale. Let's turn to another one of the most significant innovations of this mission, and that was the nature of your team

and how you administered, how you ran this mission. Talk about your colleagues there at the University of Arizona and around the world and sort of the precedent that was set. Yes, the University of Arizona was really excited about hosting a Mars mission. And as we wrote our proposal, the first thing we decided was we were trying to do our operations phase, which, of course, is the science phase of the mission, in Tucson. And the university was so excited, they actually donated an entire building for our use. And we rewired it as an operations center, and we allowed 25 or 30 students to support

our mission during the operations phase, and it really worked extremely well. In the past, with the rover mission, scientists have had to go to the Jet Propulsion Lab to do the operations phase, and so this was a chance for scientists to be in sort of their home territory, a university, and have engineers from the Jet Propulsion Lab come to us, and I think it worked very well. Hopefully, we'll see other missions doing the same. Peter, we're just about out of time. Can you guess the question that I am asked most often about this spacecraft? Did we find life?

Yeah, well, there's that one. But no, you know what? When I get to talking to people, everybody asks, is it going to come back? Are we going to hear from Phoenix again in the spring? asks, is it going to come back? Are we going to hear from Phoenix again in the spring? Well, you know, we think of this period of the mission right now as the sleeping beauty mode. The real question is, will the prince return to bring her back to life? I always tell people, no, no, no, it's not possible at all. But I mean, you actually did plan for this eventuality, as unlikely as it may be.

Well, we always thought it was a possibility. However, we didn't put it in as a phase of our mission. So we have no money to support that at the moment. But we'll certainly be listening for signals next October, which would be the Martian spring and the sun coming back up again. And at that time, if we do hear signals, and it's obvious that the spacecraft is commandable, in other words, you can really use it to gather science data, then yes, I think we will certainly make a bid for additional funding and try and continue.

Got one more TIGA oven left, right? We have an oven left. We have a weather station that still functions. We have cameras. We have the robotic arm that's still working. You know, we could do some things. And to find out what happened over the winter would be a very interesting thing to do. Peter, I want to thank you for one of the highlights of my year on May 25th when we all gathered in Pasadena and celebrated the successful landing of Phoenix and also for sharing all of this with us over the course of this year, the landing of this marvelous spacecraft for which you are now going to spend,

I assume, the next few years of your life analyzing the reams of data that came from it. Yes, we are. We have 30,000 pictures from just one of our cameras, and there's a lot to look at. Thanks again for joining us on Planetary Radio, Peter. Thank you, Matt, and thanks for your support during the mission. We really appreciate that. Oh, and I'm hoping that that Visions of Mars DVD

has found a good resting place near the North Pole of Mars. Certainly has, and if any of your listeners happen to be in the neighborhood, it's a free lending library. That's right. Well, let's hope so someday. Peter Smith is the principal investigator for the Phoenix Lander, now resting within essentially the Arctic Circle on the Red Planet. He is at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab.

He's been there for more than 30 years, and he's now a senior research scientist at that facility. We will be right back with this week's edition of What's Up? and Bruce Betts. That's after we hear from Emily Lakdawalla. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, How is it that the rover team was surprised that Gusev Crater was made of volcanic rock? Couldn't they have figured that out using the orbiters?

Both rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were sent to landing sites to look for signs of ancient water on Mars. There was a very careful process, involving hundreds of scientists using the best available data to select landing sites that would be likely to contain signs of water. However, when Spirit landed in Gusev Crater five years ago, the mission was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the rocks that filled the floor of the crater were volcanic, not sedimentary, as far as Spirit could see. When the landing sites were picked, the best available data came mostly from one mission, Mars Global Surveyor, which entered orbit in 1997. The TESS instrument on that spacecraft was the best spectrometer ever sent into Mars orbit, but it wasn't nearly as high resolution as the Themis

instrument on the Mars Odyssey orbiter that followed it. And Themis is, in turn, outmatched in spectral detail by two spectrometers that arrived with Mars Express in 2003 and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007. So our ability to detect Mars minerals from orbit has improved by orders of magnitude since the rovers landed. The landing site selection process for the next rover, Mars Science Laboratory, orbit has improved by orders of magnitude since the rovers landed. The landing site selection process for the next rover, Mars Science Laboratory, is being guided by much better knowledge of where to find water-related minerals on the surface of Mars than was available to the Spirit and Opportunity teams. That

means we can be much more confident that the next rover will land in a place whose rocks will tell a story of ancient water on Mars and yield clues about whether Mars could ever have harbored life. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is with us via Skype once again, but ready to celebrate the night sky in the usual fashion and your trivia answers in the current contest,

which we'll be getting to by and by. Welcome back. Hi and hi. I hope this will be a wonderful new year for all of us. Let's get it off to a good start. All right. Well, a good way to check it out is Venus is about as high in the sky as it ever gets in the evening sky. Over there in the west after sunset, it's the really, really, really bright star-like object.

So check that out. You can also see Saturn rising in the middle of the night over in the east. And then in the pre-dawn sky, it will be high overhead, looking kind of yellowish, and it will keep moving more and more into the evening sky as the weeks and months go along. Oh, I wanted to mention there is an annular solar eclipse on January 26th, where the moon covers most of the sun if you're in just the right place, leaving only an annulus around the outside. A few people are though, but there are people who can at least check out a partial solar eclipse that day, visible throughout most of southern Africa, southeastern Asia, and western Australia. On to Random Space Fact!

Oh, gee. I think you just revealed that you're feeling a little bit under the weather. Yeah, I couldn't hold up the high standards. But I do have a good fact because I love primates in space that aren't necessarily human. On September 20th, 1951, a monkey named Yorick and 11 mice, poor guy had to travel with 11 mice, but fortunately they were in coach. He was in first mice. Poor guy had to travel with 11 mice, but fortunately they were in coach. He was in first class. Was recovered after an Araby missile flight going into space at 236,000 feet, and Yorick got a lot of press because he was the first monkey to, well, live through a space flight. Alas, poor Yorick. Alas, poor Yorick.

Alas, poor Yorick. Alas, poor Yorick. Ironic, isn't it? So let's go straight on to trivia where we asked you what kind of glass is the Palomar 200-inch mirror made of? How did we do, Matt? Was that too weird or did that work out for people? Oh, no. People like this question a lot and we got lots of great responses. And you know what's interesting is how many people told us that at some point in their life they had managed to shatter Pyrex.

Well, that's why they still try not to drop things on the 200-inch telescope, which is indeed made of Corning Pyrex. And was cast by the Corning Glassworks. Lo, those many years ago. Yeah, it's good stuff for some of the same reasons. You use it in playing with hot liquids and cold things and going back and forth is that it does not expand or contract as much due to temperature changes as regular glass. And therefore, when you've got a telescope mirror,

that means that you don't lose, it doesn't go out of focus as much due to temperature changes as regular glass. And therefore, when you've got a telescope mirror, that means that you don't lose, it doesn't go out of focus and keep changing focus as the mirror expands and contracts. And it was actually very, very early on in the use of Pyrex that they made that mirror. Who's our winner this week? The winner is Kevin Hecht. And this is a surprise because I have no record of Kevin having won in the past, and yet he enters just about every week and has, if I'm not mistaken, for years.

But Kevin Hecht of Pleasant Plains, Illinois, did come up with Pyrex and said exactly what you did. That's what makes it desirable for microwavable measuring cups, and it's the same thing makes it good for really big mirrors. Can I tell you just one of the stories about people who saw Pyrex shatter? Oh, please do. This wasn't actually William Stewart, but it was apparently a roommate or a housemate of his at one time. This guy, whose name is Hervé, took a glass dish, I assume a Pyrex one, out of the oven, put it in the sink, and turned on the cold water.

Needless to say, says William, the dish shattered, showering everyone with splinters, at which Hervé uttered the immortal line, C'est impossible, c'est Pyrex. Yeah, yeah. Now, as I say, they try not to throw cold water on the mirror after they've heated it. You know, I've looked down on that mirror from the prime focus. It is awe-inspiring. And they do lecture you before you go out there

to take all things out of your pockets that might fall like coins. I don't know. They're protective. Yeah, I wonder why. Well, we should tell that we're not going to throw any cold water on Kevin Hecht either. He is going to get a Planetary Radio T-shirt and an Oceanside photo and telescope rewards card. We really appreciate it, Kevin. Congratulations.

And we've got a new contest. And for this contest, we'll once again be giving away the Year in Space desk calendar with all its fabulous pictures and This Week in Space history kind of information and articles and other good stuff. You can find out more from our website, from planetary.org slash radio. We'll tell you other ways you can get that calendar. We're going to give one away if you give us the correct answer

and are randomly selected as the winner for the following question. Back to primates in space, who was the first chimpanzee in space? Not monkey, none of those stinking tails. Who was the first chimpanzee in space? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. When do they need to get that in by, Matt? They better get in to us by the 12th, January 12th, 2009.

Whoa. That's Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Are we done? Yeah, I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about your favorite sports team. Thank you, and good night. You're watching football, aren't you?

I am watching my favorite sports team right now. Yeah, I did just at the very end there get to see, who was it? Baltimore beat Miami? Yes, indeed. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society and a major football fan. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Go Vikings! Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.