Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas

Episode Date: July 27, 2009

John Callas reports on Spirit and Opportunity, Bill Nye debates the future of humans on the Moon, and Bruce Betts looks to the Perseid meteor shower in his What's Up review of the night sky.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greetings, pod people of planet Earth. Haven't talked to you in a couple of weeks this way, but once again, thank you for those of you who amazingly continue to donate to support the radio show so that we can keep doing this for you week after week. Great fun. I certainly hope that you've enjoyed our Apollo 11 anniversary coverage, ending with Ray Bradbury last week, and also what we're about to do this week, back to what we normally do,

talking about things like the Mars Exploration Rovers. And maybe, I don't know if it's going to happen next week or the following week, we'll be welcoming Emily back. Emily Lactewala will be back with Q&A. So if you have any questions for her, send them on in. You can send them to me at planetaryradio at planetary.org, and I will certainly get them to Ms. Laktawalla. And boy, are we excited about her returning to active duty at the Planetary Society. Thanks so much for joining us, and it is not too late. You knew I had to say this. If you'd like to make your donation

to help Planetary Radio stay on the air, visit our website, planetary.org slash radio. Thanks for listening. Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callis, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Operation Rover Project Manager John Callis, 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. Spirit has been stuck in the sands of Mars for two months. Her handlers at the Jet Propulsion Lab are searching for a way out. Meanwhile, Opportunity races for Endeavour Crater on the other side of the red planet.

We'll get a mission update from the man in charge of both rovers. Our friend Bill Nye feels pretty strongly about Mars and the Moon, for that matter. We'll hear from the science and planetary guy in less than a minute. Later today, Bruce Betts will start gearing up for the annual Perseid meteor shower as he shares other news of the night sky in What's Up. Bruce has also cooked up yet another space trivia contest, and this one might win you a special prize. Hey, here's reason for the solar system to celebrate. Emily Lakdawalla returns from maternity leave next week.

We're down to the last two guest bloggers on the Planetary Society blog. You can check out Janie Radabaugh's entries this week at planetary.org. Janie will be followed by Bill Nye. Here's Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of Planetary Society. Lots of people over the last week have been commenting about the 40th anniversary of humans walking on the moon, which was largely United States effort. And I must tell you, I was one of them. I was commenting as well

on the Los Angeles Times dust-up section. I got into a debate with a guy named Michael Potter, Times dust-up section. I got into a debate with a guy named Michael Potter, and he is generally one of these people, and there are many, many of them, of you, who think that the United States, that NASA should go back to the moon with people. Why? Because China and the Indian Space Research Organization are doing that. Well, of course, let's say that's not a reason. No, because we're going to build colonies and moon bases, and we're going to go live on the moon and learn to live off the land, and it's going to be just fantastic. And I say to these people, I don't think it's going to happen.

We have not set up a colony in Antarctica. I mean, people live there. They do scientific research, and that's important and interesting. And that, of course, may happen on the moon, but that is not a reason to build spaceships by the U.S. government. I mean, if people want to go there and set up commercial organizations, perhaps that'll work out. But it's not going to happen in the next two decades, in the next 20 years. A colony on the moon, that's a big hassle. Instead, we should be looking for something new and cool to do.

And that might include going to an asteroid, sending people to an asteroid. We'd learn how to get people into these remarkable orbits that don't need as much energy as going up and down from the so-called gravity well of the moon. But at any rate, it was a debate that's been raging or been going on for a couple weeks. And the guy who's really got to deal with this is not me, nor Mr. Potter, nor most of us in the Planetary Society. Instead, it is Charles Bolden, the brand new administrator of NASA. He's a four-time astronaut flyer. He's a member of the Astronaut Hall of Fame. And he's the guy that's got to figure out how to manage the NASA forces that want to return to the Cold War-style visiting of the moon or go on and do something

new and exciting. You know, about half of us don't remember the moon landing. Why? Because we weren't born. The moon landing is old news. Let's do something new and cool. And at what cost? Well, to Mr. Bolden and to all of us, I say at a reasonable cost. That's what's got to be figured out. Okay, thanks for listening. I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. I'm Ashley Stroop, and I'm one of the rover drivers here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

and I'm here with the latest Free Spirit update. This week we're continuing crab driving testing. That means we're steering the wheels to different angles and trying to get the rover to move sideways along the hill. We've done some testing both with forward crabbing and now we're doing backward crabbing and we've now got the wheels steered to several different angles. The test you can see behind me, we've got the wheels all steered to 20 degrees and they're all driving backwards to try to pull the rover backward and uphill away from these potential obstacles that we

seem to have run into in our first attempt to get out of the sand trap. We break each test into several smaller pieces so that we can measure the rover's progress along the way. That way we can tell whether the rover is making steady progress throughout the test or whether it may come up against a wall and only make good progress at the beginning, in which case then we know that extra wheel turns are not going to make much of a difference. That update from rover driver Ashley Stroop

is helping to keep anxious fans like yours truly up to date on Spirit's predicament. We've got a link to Ashley's Free Spirit webcast at planetary.org slash radio. John Callis has been project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers for more than three years. He came to the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California, more than 20 years ago to work on advanced spacecraft propulsion systems. Advanced as in antimatter. But Mars has dominated his work since 1989 and through seven missions. I called him up a few days ago for an update on Spirit, along with her sister Opportunity, still a roving the red planet. John, thanks very much for coming on to Planetary Radio.

I was just looking at some of the video online. This has got to be one of the most dramatic things that has ever taken place in a sandbox. Yes, it is. I mean, it's dramatic because it represents a very serious situation for the rover on Mars. This is perhaps the most serious embedding event that either rover has experienced in their five years on the surface. If you could encapsulate or summarize for us, what's the current status? I mean, it's been how long now since Spirit got stuck? Spirit got embedded in this location on the west side of home plate a little over two months ago. When we realized it, when we discovered how serious this was, we let spirits stay put,

and we've now engaged in this very ambitious ground testing activity. We don't have AAA on Mars, so we have to bring Mars down to Earth. And so what we've done is we've set up a sandbox to recreate the conditions on Mars. And then we are doing a series of tests with our engineering rover, which is identical to Spirit. It's kind of the third unknown sibling, this test rover. And we're looking at what maneuvers will work and what won't. Avoid the things that don't work, focus on what does work, and exhaustively test that out before we do anything with Spirit. Because the concern is we don't want to make things worse. We want to find out what will make things better. How confident are you that you've come as close as possible to duplicating Spirit's situation on Mars? Well, we cannot duplicate it perfectly. What we have is a proxy. It's a best estimate of

what the conditions are, and we know it's imperfect. There are some things that we can't simulate. The gravity on Mars is only three-eighths the gravity here on Earth. So our rover here at JPL weighs too much to represent what Spirit waves on Mars. So that's one shortcoming. And then we can't replicate the materials exactly. So we have to make some trades and some engineering compromises to come up with what we think is a bounding case or a bounding set of situations, what was more likely a worst-case situation. If we can get our test rover out of a worst-case situation here on the ground, then we should be able to get Spirit out of her particular man on Mars.

I really encourage people to go to the website, the MER website, and we'll provide a link to that at planetary.org slash radio, and take a look at some of the things that are being done. I'm not, of course, a bit surprised at how careful your crew is being in this, but it is really painstaking work. Well, it is very hard, gritty, sweaty work, because we had to create, develop, and mix over 5,400 pounds of simulant. So we're talking, you know, almost three tons of stuff that had to be shoveled in by hand and then raked and groomed and conditioned by hand. And it's a messy job.

How optimistic are you? Are we going to see Spirit rolling across Mars once again, or can anybody answer that? Well, what we're doing with the testing is to try to answer that question. Spirit is in a difficult situation. Remember, Spirit is the rover that has only five operating wheels. The right front wheel failed about three years ago, and we've been driving around Mars without that wheel. It has compromised mobility, and so now that we're embedded, we have only five wheels to get us out instead of six. Additionally, the rover is rolled or tilted to the left by about 10 to 12 degrees, and that also makes it difficult. And then there are some rocks underneath the rover. One may be jamming one of

the wheels, one of the remaining driving wheels, and there's a rock that we have seen that's touching the underside of the rover. So all this makes for a very complicated situation. Regardless of whether you get out or not, lest anybody think that Spirit's days of sending back good science to Earth are over, they're really not. You've done some terrific things there, and I just saw a beautiful 3-D image of dust devils. saw a beautiful 3-D image of dust devils. Well, it seems that whenever Mars hands the rovers lemons,

the rovers make lemonade. Especially spirit. And in this case where spirit is embedded, actually the soil that's been churned up by the embedding is some of the most scientifically interesting material on Mars. And the science team has been extremely busy investigating this. It's suggested that these loose, fine materials that are giving Spirit all this trouble are actually recently, or putatively recently, remobilized minerals. In other words, it's stuff from somewhere else on Mars that were transported to this

location. from somewhere else on Mars that were transported to this location. So it's indicative of processes on Mars that have been active since the minerals were formed. So the team is delighted to have the time to investigate it while we're working on getting Spirit out. How is Spirit's health otherwise? Well, our big concern at the time of the embedding was that there was so much dust on the solar rays that we needed to think about the next Martian winter and get Spirit situated and prepared for that winter.

But since the embedding, several dust cleaning events have occurred in which most of the dust that had been on the solar rays has been blown off, and we now have three to four times as much energy each day for the rover. So Spirit went from being almost starved on energy to having an abundance of riches in terms of energy. Oh, that's excellent. Are you ever surprised after all these years to see, even when something goes wrong like this, the tremendous interest by your public, your fans, or at least the rovers fans around the world. Well, these rovers are human proxies on Mars. They are intrepid explorers that are

exploring an unknown world, and they're doing it in a very human-like way. And the results that they find are taken very much with a human perspective. So it's very easy to think of these rovers in human terms. And of course, those of us who work with the rovers and the public that have been following along, we've all become very attached to them. And we feel for them and we worry for them and we want them to be successful. That's John Callis, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers. He'll have more to tell us about Spirit and Opportunity after a break. This is Planetary Radio.

Hi, I'm Lou Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society. You've made Planetary Radio one of our most successful programs. Our valued listeners depend on it for weekly space-related news, entertainment, and inspiration. However, today's economy is forcing the society to make tough choices. As a result, the future of Planetary Radio is now on the line. Planetary Radio urgently needs your financial support to continue. We know this program is important to you, so we're asking you to make a donation dedicated to keeping Planetary Radio alive. Please visit our webpage at planetary.org slash radio.

Tax-deductible donations of $50 or more will be rewarded with a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our listeners are a thoughtful and committed team. I trust you will help sustain Planetary Radio so we can continue to explore new worlds. Please extend your lifeline of support at planetary.org slash radio and thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callis has one five-year-old explorer still zipping along the plains of Mars. John's team at JPL is working hard to help their other child work herself out of a sand trap where there is no shortage of sand. John and I were talking before the break about how so

many of us back here on Earth have come to think of spirit and opportunity as more than just machines. Our guest on last week's show was one of the first to think of our robotic representatives this way. You know, we just had Ray Bradbury on this show last week, and as he often says, he actually looked back to an event 33 years ago last week at JPL when the Viking 1 landing took place, and the interview that he did there, and the reporter said, hey, Ray, what do you think? There are no cities, there are no Martians, and he said, you idiot, we're the Martians now, and I am right there, and I am sure that most of the people listening to this show think of Spirit and Opportunity as the emissaries of Earth on that red planet.

Well, they are certainly residents on Mars, and they've been there for, you know, over five years. You know, you spend five years at any place and you're considered a local. That's right. Let's go to the other side of the planet, to Meridiani Planum, and talk about Opportunity, which is still very much in motion. In fact, you seem to be racing toward that goal. In fact, you seem to be racing toward that goal. Yes, we are certainly racking up the mileage on opportunity. We just passed 17 kilometers of odometry. I'll remind your listeners, this is for a rover that was designed only to traverse one kilometer.

This is like your car going 1.7 million miles and doing it without an oil change. Yeah, and well beyond the 90-day warranty. Certainly. Opportunity is heading towards Endeavor Crater, which is this giant 20-kilometer crater that's still some 16 kilometers away. So we are actually talking about almost doubling the odometry on the rover as it stands right now in order to get to Endeavour Crater. But recently, in just the last couple of days, we spied a cobble. These are rocks that sit out on the surface of Mars. But this cobble is about a meter and a half in diameter. So it is a very big cobble.

It's the biggest rock we've seen on the surface of Mars as a singular rock standing on its own. And it's very dark in color. So we went zooming past this thing. We saw it. And so now we're turning around and heading back to it because it's very interesting because it's either a meteorite, but it would be a huge meteorite, or it's another piece of Mars from another part of the planet. And so it potentially can tell us a lot about Mars or about our solar system. huge meteorite, or it's another piece of Mars from another part of the planet. And so it potentially can tell us a lot about Mars or about our solar system. I may have missed this. Is there an image of this on the website?

There should be on our public website. It's one of the PanCam images from a few sols ago. All right. We'll see if we can find that. And if it's there, we'll put up a link to that as well. What is Opportunity, and for that matter, Spirit, continuing to tell us about Mars? I mean, it's almost old hat now that they gave us the proof years ago that this was a wet planet. Well, I would never think of the exploration of Mars as being old hat. No, no, no. You know, what they continue to tell us is they continue to add sophistication to our understanding of what Mars was like in the ancient past. And that, you know, the early observations by the rovers, you know, found the presence of liquid water. We then learned

that it was evaporating water. And then we subsequently learned that it was salty. And subsequent to that, we learned that it was flowing and dynamic and that it was very acidic. You know, and then we have the more recent discoveries by Spirit of the presence of hot springs. So now we not only have liquid water, but we have energy sources in conjunction with that liquid water, and all this is starting to add excitement about the possibility that Mars was a habitable planet and it could have supported life, or there may even be life there today. With Opportunity heading to Endeavor Crater, one of the objectives there is to search for the presence of phyllosilicates, which are minerals that form in an aqueous environment, but it would be a neutral pH aqueous environment,

which is of great interest to the exobiologists because it's suspected that life here on Earth originated in a neutral pH environment. Is that related a little bit to this very interesting finding from Phoenix, which we've talked to folks at that mission about? The way we looked for life with Phoenix might have been self-defeating, perhaps the same as with Viking over 30 years ago, because we cooked it, and that may have cooked any organics. Not that your rover is able to detect organics.

Yeah, we're not a life detection mission. We're a geology mission, and what the rovers have been focused on from Sol 1 is to do a broad geologic assessment of the planet, find out what it was like in the ancient past. And what the rovers have told us, and they continue to refine, is that Mars had liquid water on the surface and therefore needed a thicker atmosphere and required warmer temperatures, and that now there are places where there were energy sources. And so all this begins to make Mars look much more Earth-like a long time ago. Let's look a little bit into the future as we get close to wrapping up at what is certainly likely, we hope, will be the next rover on the surface,

Mars Science Laboratory. Those guys are, I'm sure, neighbors of yours, colleagues of yours. How has what you have learned from these two rovers been able to assist those guys with the next generation? Well, many of the same people that built the Mars Exploration Rovers are building the Mars Science Laboratory. And so that expertise and that experience base is already there. The wonderful thing about the Mars Science Laboratory is it is the next logical step of exploration for Mars. Where our rovers are the geology mission, the Mars Science Laboratory will be the analytical chemistry mission. And so they'll be able to take the questions that the rovers have

revealed, my rovers, and we'll be able to then explore those answers. Look for the question about, are there organics on Mars? You know, what is the inventory of other carbon-based compounds? What is the, you know, the dynamism of putative methane in the atmosphere? You know, those kinds of things which will answer more directly the question about, was there life on Mars or is there evidence of past life or current life. John, are you selling Free Spirit T-shirts? You can get them online, so I got mine.

I'm going to grab one. That's just too great. I love the campaign and wish you the greatest of success, continued success, with both of these rovers. And hopefully someday before too long, Spirit will be out there rolling across Mars once again. Thank you very much for your interest. John Callis is the project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit and Opportunity, our friends, our ambassadors to the red planet. We'll be talking with Bruce Betts, our own ambassador to the entire cosmos, in just a couple of moments as we pick up with this week's edition of What's Up.

Bruce Betts is here. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. And is it the last mention? No, I think it's the second to the last mention of the Apollo 11 anniversary, but that's not until the trivia contest. Welcome back. Thank you very much. You can never mention it enough. But we'll have some other different Apollo random space facts coming up. First, let's tell you what's in the night sky. Coming up August 12th is the peak of the Perseids meteor shower, so's tell you what's in the night sky. Coming up August 12th

is the peak of the Perseids meteor shower, so I want to get that in people's heads. Traditionally the second best of the year in terms of number of meteors, maybe up to 60 per hour in a dark site, so go out and stare at the sky somewhere within a few days of that, ideally close to August 12th. If you're out there in the evening, you can check out Saturn getting kind of low over in the east after sunset. Jupiter coming up in the later evening in the east looking like an extremely bright star. And in the pre-dawn, it's still up, but it's high in the sky in the south. And we've got Venus just dominating the eastern sky looking incredibly bright. And Mars separating from Venus, getting higher and higher in the sky,

looking reddish and much dimmer. May I ask, is there any indication whether the Perseids will be better or worse than usual? Is there even a way to determine that? Not usually. Some of the showers are where basically a meter shower occurs when we're passing through a bunch of debris left over, usually from a cometary pass. Some showers are more erratic because it really depends on which previous train you pass through of the comet. Perseids, I think, are fairly stable, but there

probably is some variation I'm unfamiliar with. What's more important is trying to avoid the moonlight so you get a nice dark sky. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. On to this week in space history. That's right. 1971, a moment marked in NASCAR history, the first time a vehicle was driven on the moon, Apollo 15, the lunar rover. 1971, two years after Apollo 11 Wow, you're right I'm very good at that level of math

The Apollo 500 meters They're being beat by the Mars rovers As we heard just a few minutes ago on today's show They are, they most definitely are That was almost a random space fact, but let's go on to the official random space fact. There's a little resonance there that we don't usually get via Skype connection. A little added bonus. It's still up right now. STS-127 space shuttle mission when it docked with the International Space Station last week.

It was the first time that 13 people were in space all docked up together. So one super spacecraft. There have been 13 in space before, for example, with when you had Mir and shuttle and Soyuz up at one time, but they weren't all nestled together in one joined spacecraft. Somewhat apropos of that, saw a beautiful image of the current configuration of ISS. And I'm telling you, I was pretty proud. You know, I really, we sometimes tend to downplay the significance of the space station, but it's so impressive to have an incredibly large structure up there.

It, for the first time to me, really looked like, gee, maybe we are getting good at this kind of thing. It's taken a while, but it's big. There's no doubt about it. And there's a bunch of stuff up there. Yeah. At least big for something sitting around in space, that's for sure. All right, let us go on to the trivia contest.

We asked you, who were the backup astronauts for the Apollo 11 crew? How'd we do, Matt? You know, this is really interesting. Got a big response. A few people pointed out, and I was far too lazy to check on this, that it seemed that NASA would schedule a backup crew that they intended to fly on a mission as the primary crew two missions later, which doesn't really hold up in this case. Our winning answer, the same as we got from many people, came from first-time winner Kevin Palm of Grafton, Ohio. Kevin, who also wanted to say that he really enjoyed the Ray Bradbury interview on the 365 Days of Astronomy

podcast a week ago. He had a lot of nice comments, by the way, a lot of congratulations, both for my daughter's wedding and to Ray for being on the show last week. But at any rate, Kevin's answer was James A. Lovell, Jr., Commander, William A. Anders, Command module pilot, and lunar module pilot Fred W. Hayes, Jr. And, of course, Lovell and Hayes, right, had also been on Apollo 8 together? No. I'm sorry. Lovell and Anders, of course. Hayes and Lovell would fly on Apollo 13.

But I guess it was what? Lovell and Hayes that—no, wait a minute. Lovellveland Anders. I'm totally lost now. Oh, let's call the whole thing off. They were all Apollo astronauts. They were great. Go ahead.

None of them ever got to walk on the moon. Just circle it. Right. All of them circled at some point, if you include Apollo 8, but in some circle, you know, went around it more than once. Yeah. Well, we're going to send Kevin a lovely Planetary Radio t-shirt. And if he wants it, a rewards card from Oceanside Photo and Telescope. What do you got for next week?

We're moving out to the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, the four big moons of Jupiter. Which Galilean satellite has the highest surface gravity? So if you're standing on the surface of a satellite, which one has the highest gravity? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. So this could be tricky because it might not be the one with the biggest diameter, I suppose. I am tricky. He's not saying.

He's not going to give us a hint. I'll just tell you it does follow the laws of physics, oddly enough. Well, it's good to know we don't violate those, at least within the confines of the solar system. You have, by the way, until the 3rd of August, August 3rd, at 2 p.m. Pacific time, to respond. And you know what we might be able to do as a prize? What? It was pointed out. I completely forgot that we had yet another Ulysses mission prize. And it's a tile, a ceramic tile commemorating the Ulysses mission, which I mean, we gave away shirts in last week, and I

totally forgot about this. That's so true. It's sitting in my office ready for you. All right. So why don't we make that the prize? All right. That is the prize. Wow. I love this low bureaucracy. I think we're done. Okay, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky and think about the usefulness of buckets. Thank you and good night. That was Bruce Betts, the captain of the bucket brigade around here. He joins us every week for What's Up? and I pale by comparison. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week.