Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Mars Exploration Rover Update

Episode Date: December 15, 2003

Planetary Radio gets a Mars Exploration Rover status report from Deputy Project Scientist, Dr. Albert Haldemann; Emily Lakdawalla can tell how old a planet is from its surface.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is Planetary Radio. Less than three weeks till the human spirit once again visits the Martian surface. Hi everyone, I'm Matt Kaplan. The Deputy Project Scientist for the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, provides a mission update for us. Later, it's Bruce Betts and family on What's Up. Never ask a woman her age, but you can ask Emily how we tell the age of a planet from its surface. I'll be right back with Albert Haldeman of JPL.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, I've heard that the northern plains of Mars are two billion years younger than the southern highlands. How can one part of Mars be younger than another part? Once a planet forms, wouldn't it all be the same age? When scientists talk about the age of Mars' plains and highlands, they're not talking about the whole planet, but instead about the surface of the planet. Our own planet

is over 4.5 billion years old, but its surface is continually changed by the action of weathering and erosion so that there is no landscape on the Earth that is older than a few hundred million years. On the other hand, the Moon's surface has not really changed much in over three billion years. How do we tell how old these surfaces are? For the Earth and a few other places in the solar system, we have rock samples that can be dated directly using radiometric age dating. But the way we really get a handle on the ages of places in the solar system is using craters. How do we do that? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Dr. Albert Haldeman is the Deputy Project Scientist for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. He's not the only person with a Caltech Ph.D. in planetary science,

but he may be the only jet propulsion lab researcher who flew fighters for the Swiss Air Force. Born in Switzerland, he grew up in Toronto, Canada, before returning to Europe for college and that stint as a pilot. He arrived in California almost 12 years ago, where he now lives with his wife and two daughters. Albert Haldeman, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio this week. Good morning.

The Spirit, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, arrives on Mars January 3rd, and after it stops bouncing, you get to start doing some science. What is the current status of the mission? Well, we're well on our way. I think, as Steve Squire said at a press conference at the landing minus 30-day press conference a few days ago, Mars is starting to look pretty big in the windshield. We're really looking forward to arrival, and things are going well. We're ready. We're on our way, and we have all the pieces in place for a successful entry, descent, and landing on

the 3rd of January West Coast time. And then thereafter, it'll take us a few days to get off the lander. We're going to proceed cautiously, baby steps first, learning to crawl before we learn to run with these machines and get our science over the 90 falls that we have planned. And when you mention that you're going to stay on the lander for a little while, I know that there will be some pictures taken before the rover crawls off the lander. That's right.

There will be some pictures taken right away, even before we deploy the mast on which the pan cam color camera is located, as well as the navigation cameras. And then the mast will deploy automatically either on the first day, the landing day, or the day after that. Then we have, I believe it's on the fourth day on the surface, Sol 4, we have a campaign of science investigations taking panoramas both with the color camera and with the infrared thermal emission spectrometer, the mini thermal emission spectrometer, or mini test.

So we're going to take a full panorama with both of those instruments looking at the landing site around us and use that to guide our plans for how we're going to investigate that landing site. Can we talk a little bit about those instruments? We have discussed the panoramic camera, or pan cam in the past on this program, and that is this very high-resolution stereoscopic camera that sits up on top of that mass that's going to pop up? That's right. It has a 17-degree field of view, but what makes it kind of neat is that its resolution, when you say very high resolution, that may be by comparison to previous cameras on Mars.

Really, it's resolution that's pretty much equivalent to the human eye. on Mars, really it's a resolution that's pretty much equivalent to the human eye. It sees as well as we do, which is a good thing, because then that lets the geologists who are looking at the pictures interpret them as they would images or just looking around them in the field. It really allows us to have a robotic field geologist sending us data that the humans back on Earth can use as they would the information they would see in the field on Earth to do a geologic interpretation and evaluation of the landing site, which, by the way, I'll mention for Spirit is Gusev Crater, a putative crater lake

where the channel from Ma'a Dimbalis flows in at the south and flows back out again at the north. And we have good reason to suspect that a lake was ponded in that crater in the past. Yeah, I hope we can talk a little bit later more about these landing sites, not only Gusev, but the Meridiani site that Opportunity is aiming for. You also mentioned the miniature thermal emission spectrometer, or is it MiniTESS? That's right, MiniTESS, and it is related, not only because the science team that put it together is related or very similar to and led by the people who built the thermal emission spectrometer instrument on Mars Global Surveyor,

but because it's a very similar instrument. It gets infrared spectra in the range of infrared light that is emitted by solid objects, sort of longward of about 2 microns wavelength. And that area of the infrared spectrum contains features, bumps, wiggles, squiggly lines, is what we'll be showing, that are indicative, that provide fingerprints for different minerals. And it's that kind of information that led to the discovery from orbit by TESS, the Thermal Emission Spectrometer on Mars Global Surveyor, of the hematite deposit that's the target of our second landing with Opportunity,

but also of the general composition of the surface of Mars being generally basaltic with somewhat more silica content in the northern lowlands as well. So we'll be able to do that kind of work close up, and we have the advantage on the surface that, I should say the complicating factor for tests in orbit is the carbon dioxide atmosphere in between provides spectral features that confuse the analysis a little bit and make it a little bit more

complicated. If we're right down on the surface there's less atmosphere between us and the rock we're looking at we should get a cleaner picture of the composition of the rocks taking those instruments right down to the ground. Now, a lot of your other instruments are going to have to wait until the rover can get off of that lander and start pushing up against some rocks. That's right. We expect now that it's going to take us nine Martian days to make sure that all of our deployments and unfoldings and lockings of the wheels

after jacking up the rover really have been correctly accomplished so that we can safely drive off the lander and also to provide us time to do those panoramic image acquisitions of our landing site. Then when we get onto the surface, one of our first tasks is going to be unlocking the robotic arm and then using that robotic arm, learning to use that robotic arm on Mars, it's more complex than the deployment device that was on the Sojourner rover. This is a real robotic arm with five degrees of freedom like a human arm.

It has a shoulder and an elbow and a wrist and a couple fingers if you want to anthropomorphize the instruments as well. And so then we'll get to use the two spectrometers. We have two of those four fingers for elemental composition with the alpha particle x-ray spectrometer and looking specifically at the mineralogy of iron minerals in the rocks that we come up to with the Mossbire spectrometer. And then we have a microscopic imager that'll let us look in detail at the surface of a rock. And then finally, the rock abrasion tool lets us clean away the dust that's coating the rocks we've seen on Mars so far, and also to grind our way into the rock a little bit and get it a more clean surface.

Then we can deploy those other instruments on that internal surface of the rock, clear picture of what the rock is, how it formed, where it formed, and infer from that kind of information the environment of that rock's formation, which we're hoping is going to be the clues to understanding the past history of water at both Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum. And that follow-the-water theme, that motto, is very much what this mission is about. That's correct. We're a step in the follow the water theme in the

sense that we want to understand our scientific objective for this mission is to understand the past history of water on Mars and what that tells us about the past habitability of Mars. And we're going to do that at these two distinct sites by understanding the geology at the two sites. You are talking about anthropomorphizing the spacecraft, at least in terms of the robotic arm. The mass that the PanCam is on, I mean, we humans, we're so programmed to see two little lenses and interpret those as eyes and almost a face.

When that mass pops up, has that struck anybody else as being sort of our anthropomorphic representative on the red planet? Oh, absolutely. That's part of it. It's got four eyes, however, actually five if you count the eye in the back of its head that is the opening for the mini-test. Don't we wish. We all had it. Eyes in the back of our head, yes. It's the x-ray vision vision or about the x-ray vision i should say but the infrared vision is the eye in the back of its head the uh the visible in view

is out the front with cameras that have different fields of view so absolutely and the additional uh issue is that the height of the mast is is just over five feet so it's a very human perspective in addition to having a pair of stereo cameras. But it's also stereo cameras at a height above the ground that is not unlike what that view of the ground for many human beings. Also, it's good that it's built that way because that's how we humans are used to looking at the environment around us. So it helps us convey our presence to the surface of Mars in order to better study it. One of the difficulties in looking at the images that Sojourner took, the rover images from Sojourner,

is it's like looking at the world with your chin on the ground, and it's not a perspective that geologists are necessarily used to having. And so it's more difficult to understand how do you know is that really a big rock or not because you're not seeing it from the perspective you're used to seeing it. There are other difficulties with Mars, for example, that shadows are red and not blue like they are on Earth because the atmosphere is dusty. But the more we can look at the environment as we are used to, the better the geologists are able to use their skills that they've built up on Earth

to assess the Martian environment. Next best thing to be in there. That's right. Our guest on this week's Planetary Radio is Albert Haldeman. He is the Mars Exploration Rover Deputy Project Scientist. And Albert, if you don't mind, we'll come back after this quick break and talk a little bit more about this amazing rover and its target, the planet Mars. Okay.

Come to Pasadena's other big New Year's party. Wild About Mars comes to the Pasadena Convention Center on Saturday and Sunday, January 3rd and 4th. Join Buzz Aldrin, Ray Bradbury, and Bill Nye the Science Guy as the first Mars exploration rover arrives at the Red Planet. Order your discounted tickets by calling 1-877-PLANETS today. That's toll free, 1-877-PLANETS, or online at planetary.org. Planetary Radio returns with our special guest this week, Albert Haldeman. He is the Mars Exploration Rover Deputy Project Scientist at JPL,

where they are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first of the two Mars Exploration Rovers. Spirit will touch down, well, bounce down, I guess I should say, in Gusev Crater on the planet Mars on January 3rd, only about three weeks away. This has to be an incredibly exciting time for you and that big team at JPL. It really is. There are a lot of last-minute preparations, just making sure that everything's where it needs to be and that we've got our plans all in place.

Sort of like, what is it, the Santa Claus story, checking the list of the things that he's got it all right before he goes out and delivers the presents. We're rechecking all of our checklists to make sure we have, in fact, done everything right. It's probably about the 70th time that they're being checked. So we're ready and proceeding as planned for our landing. We've also heard about some all-nighters that folks have been putting in. Were you in on those, these simulations of the approach and landing?

That's right. We're going to operate, we have to operate these rovers, each of them with a separate team, when we have both of them on the surface, 24-7, seven days a week, as long as they last, which is hopefully going to be longer than the 90-sol plan design lifetime. In fact, I'm pretty confident it is going to be. The way we do that is we communicate with the rovers, which are semi-autonomous, which gets us around the light-time delay to Mars, so we can't joystick their driving. The rover in the afternoon will send us direct-to-Earth communication about what it did

with a selection of the data that we predefined which data we wanted to be critical, and that comes direct-to-Earth over the slower link. The rest of the data, the goodies, the pretty pictures, but that we don't absolutely need to have in hand to make decisions for planning. We send back over the link to both the Mars Odyssey spacecraft and the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft that are in orbit and fly over us a couple times a day each. We take that data. We work during the Martian night with the science team and the engineering team,

assessing the rover health and assessing the scientific data that we've received to decide what we want to do the next day. The engineers determine how much energy there's going to be available on the next day from the batteries and the solar panels, and then the scientists decide what they want to do with that energy, be it drive or take images, take spectra with the infrared with the mini-tests, or to deploy the arm. And all those things then have to be put together in a command load

that gets sent up the next morning direct to the rover. So we have something like, I think it's a 19-hour window from the downlink in the afternoon to the uplink in the morning to write a full set of commands and to check that set of commands before we send it to the rover. So that whole process, that 19-hour process, takes three shifts. And then there's another shift, the third shift at the end are the ones who send it up to the rover and check that it got there and monitor the rover during the day. We do have the potential for just an open monitoring window. We don't communicate with it directly, but we can receive just little blips that tell us certain things have happened.

Not a whole lot of sleep in store over the next few months. No. And so there's a lot of shift work, and additionally, the complexity, it's not just a simple graveyard shift where one group of people are always working from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. They're working from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Mars time, and a Mars day is just a little under 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. So actually, I gave you an eight-hour shift example, but in fact, most of our shifts are 10 hours. Those shifts move by 40 minutes a day, and that really plays havoc with your circadian rhythms. And so we're going to be working four days on and two or three days off, 10-hour shifts. And of

course, the excitement is probably going to mean that at the beginning, people are going to be pulling some longer hours. But we've got to be careful. This is expensive equipment that we've been entrusted with. And we want to make sure that we're diligent in maintaining our rest so that we make good decisions when we need to make those decisions. investigator for the Athena payload package is from Cornell. We've had him on the show in the past. In fact, he'll be on again either next week or the week after, we hope. Great. How do you guys

all come together? How does it all get coordinated? Project scientist side, you've got these folks who come in with the payload, and then you've got the project management. How does it work? Well, I could draw you an org chart, which of course would probably explain nothing. There is this external science team which developed the payload,

the very capable payload that we have, represented by Steve Squires and his co-eyes. And then there's the project at JPL. And so to explain a little bit of the relationship, the role of project scientist, I like to sometimes say it's like being a customer service representative. Joy Crisp and I work inside the project at JPL and keep open the lines of communication, help the project to make sure that its development up until now has been keeping science in mind, keeping the science customer in mind, and properly integrating the payload, the science payload, so that the engineers, to put it very simplistically, don't forget, don't just build a really nifty toy that drives on Mars, but actually keep in mind the science objectives and the

payload and how it has to be integrated so that it can actually accomplish the science objectives. So somehow that's a little bit of a customer service representative, making sure that the vendor who we work for is actually doing what the customer wants, and likewise that the customer then gets a chance to provide feedback. And that relationship then maps into how operations is going to work. The science team is going to make the science decisions and the science requests, and it will still be led by the principal investigator, the PI, Steve Squires,

and his deputy, Professor Ray Arvidson from Washington University in St. Louis. And Joy Crisp and I would have the more strategic roles within the project, making sure that the project as a whole is maintaining the science objectives that the science team is asking for. So the science team is then providing the science requests. Various science team members follow along the uplink process, the development of the commands through the Martian night while the engineers then get the code integrated, get the science instrument code integrated with the general set of commands that the machine also needs to keep itself healthy. So it's really a lot of teamwork, and we've been practicing that a lot. You alluded to that, and that's in fact the case. We've been through this, and we've practiced, and we've checked that we do things in the right order

and that the right people have the right training to get those things done. A complicated process, but we've practiced a lot, so we're ready. Albert, we're almost out of time. You talked about how these rovers are autonomous or semi-autonomous. Do you come to think of them as members of the team? I'm sure we will come to think of them as members of the team down the road because they're so easy to anthropomorphize their capabilities. It's a natural tendency, I think.

Absolutely. And I think those of us who worked with the Fido rover in the past as a prototype rover for how to do operations like this, and FIDO was used in the first training of this particular science team to get ready. This was now over a year ago. We certainly have fond affection for our rovers once they start producing data, and that's going to be happening real soon now. Well, we will, of course, continue to follow this and wish you enormous success in this very exciting dual mission to the surface of the planet Mars.

Let me ask you just one other question. In the terrific visualization or animation of the two rover missions done by Dan Moss, he shows the rover tooling around almost like an Apollo moon buggy, really moving around. Yeah, that's quite a bit of artistic license there. They don't move that fast. And I think the best analogy I've heard was from the PI Steve Squires at that press conference 10 days ago, basically saying that the best analogy is a Galapagos tortoise, both for the mass of the rover as well as for the top speed.

But you're still going to cover more ground on Mars than certainly anything or anyone has in the past. That's true, and we're also going to set a land speed record on the surface of Mars. Which I bet will stand for quite a while. For a few more years. Albert Haldeman, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. All of the planets are continually bombarded with meteorites that form craters on their surfaces. Very simply speaking, the older a surface is, the more impact craters are preserved on its surface. Places like the lunar highlands, which have not experienced geologic activity in 4 billion years, are completely covered with overlapping craters.

The story becomes much more interesting in places that are not completely covered with craters. the story becomes much more interesting in places that are not completely covered with craters. For example, a lava flow from a volcano could bury all of the impact craters around the volcano. If the volcano erupted a few billion years ago, we would now see on the lava surface only the impact craters that have accumulated since the eruption happened. Away from the volcano, we might find many more impact craters because the older ones have been buried by lava. As another example, large floods of water on Mars destroyed all of the impact craters in their paths through erosion. A Martian flood can therefore be dated by counting the impact craters

that are superimposed on the flood channel floor. This technique gives reliable information on the relative ages of surfaces, but it does not give precise information on the absolute age. That's because we don't know the rates at which meteorites bombarded the planets in the past. This technique also doesn't work very well for the Earth and Venus because the surfaces of these two geologically active planets are so young that craters are rapidly destroyed by erosion. But it works extremely well for estimating the relative ages of surfaces on Mercury, Mars, and the Moon.

Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. An extra special edition of What's Up this week, because we are joined not just by Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society Director of Projects, but the entire Betts clan is here. Hello, I'm Bruce Betts. This is the clan Betts and I'd like to introduce you to him. We've got Daniel Joseph Betts. From the other one.

From the other shows. From the other one, from the previous one. He's been brought back. Kevin Timothy Betts and my wife, Kathleen Reagan Betts. With apologies to our Scottish listeners. Yeah, I'm sorry. Well, and we may or may not hear from other members of the family as we go on through the segment, but let's hear from you first. Like ones that I resurrect?

Are my parents? Are we getting them on the phone? No, we'll keep it to immediate family. Oh, the people that are right here. Bruce? Sorry, yes. What's up? Okay, what's up in the night sky?

We've got lots of planets to look at and a challenge this week, but a worthwhile challenge. You can try to still see Mercury very low just after sunset in the southwest, just to the right of Venus, which is extremely bright. Brightest object over there in the southwest is right after the sun sets. You've got Mars and Saturn, both Mars up at sunset, reddish-orangeish, Saturn up there. I like the sound effects of the Mars rising and Mercury setting. Can we do it? Okay, and in the morning sky, we also have Jupiter, which rises around the middle of the night.

All bright things. Good to look for fun stuff. Okay. Let's move on to this week in space history. What happened this week in space history? I'm glad you asked. Now, if I could only remember, life would be good. Wait.

He's got to reach for the notes here. Yeah. Okay. Oh, I remember. This one wasn't a very big deal. That's why I couldn't remember it. December 17th, 1903. What happened on that day, Matt?

Do you know? 1903. 1903. 1903, December 7th. Why, that's exactly 100 years ago, isn't it? Yes. Boy, you know. Let's call it Centennial.

Can you say Centennial? Centennial. Thank you. Of, you know. It's called a centennial. Can you say centennial? Centennial. Thank you. Of course you can. You know, I'm sure it was really important, but I've been reading so much about the Wright brothers that I have no idea what it is you're talking about. Oh.

Well, wait a second. It is the Wright brothers. Oh, there you go. It's the 100th anniversary of powered flight. There you go. It happened 100 years ago, December 17, 2003, setting off the age of flight, which then led to the age of space flight, which has then led to the age of planetary radio. Yes, and us.

You're right. Exactly. Let's move on to, ready? Ready, everybody? Random Space Fact! The family that, what, chants together? I don't know. Random Space Fact! The family that, what, chants together? I don't know. Random Space Fact.

Some of you listeners may know this already, but I want to share with you that on the Mars Exploration rovers, the calibration target will also function as a sundial. And, in fact, the Planetary Society is involved in the development of that, as well as our students will be doing the processing of the images in collaboration with various other organizations. So, calibration target for the cameras, a sundial. And something that Bill Nye, the science guy, also has taken a big interest in, right? Most definitely. He was really the one

who saw that thing that sticks sticking up on the calibration target to cast shadows, and said, hey, we can make a sundial out of this, and it'll be a great education outreach kind of thing to do. And as he said on this show, the motto is two worlds, one sun. My motto is, of course, one world and two suns. I was just going to say it would be reversed in your case. But seriously, folks.

But seriously, folks, But seriously, folks. We're going to come back to sundials in just a little bit. But right now, let's go on to the trivia question from last week. Trivia question last week was, what was the name of the Apollo 17 lunar module? Daniel, do you know this one? What was the name of the Apollo 17 lunar module? Starts with a C. Challenger.

Yeah, Challenger, that's right. All right, how'd the listeners do? Well, the listeners, we got, I don't know what's been happening lately, because the prizes aren't any better than they've ever been, but we're getting more responses. Well, it's a beautiful calendar, folks. It's because of the massive listenership. The calendar this week is going to go to Kim Mataram,

Mr. Kim Mataram, Mr. Kim Mataram. I think I'm pronouncing it correctly. He lives in Connolly, Australia, Western Australia. He sent the response first, and it came out all gobbledygook. And I wrote him a note back because I was able to reply, and I said, you know what? It's not working. Could you try it once again? So he sent it again.

He said, what? You can't read Australian? And apparently all I had to do was turn my computer monitor upside down. Oh, okay. You should know that by now. But Kim, it was worth a second try, Kim, because you are our winner this week. You'll be receiving that beautiful space calendar. And Kim wants us to know that Connolly is a suburb of Perth, the capital city of West Australia, the most isolated capital city on Earth.

There you go. A little more planetary information for you. That's very nice. What did you have to say, Dan? Well, I bet this planetary radio is going to be a really funny and good one because we all are. Exactly.

Can we find a few more like Jim? I hope so. It's hard, but there's going to be something nice in your stocking this Christmas. All right, let's go on to this week's trivia question. Speaking of sundials, what's that thingy in the middle of a sundial called, the thing that casts a shadow? Don't answer, Matt, because this is the trivia question. No, I think I know.

It's called the Perth, I think. Yes, it is Perth, yes. Anyway, tell us, what casts a shadow in a sundial? What is the official term for that? And speaking of sundials, by the way, you can not only enter a contest by going to planetary.org, but you can also build a sundial, an Earth dial. Be part of our Earth dial project spearheaded in partnership with Bill Nye the Science Guy as well as Woody Sullivan from the University of Washington. You can build a sundial, which we are calling Earth dials, and put it in all of your locations around the world, including near Perth, Australia,

around the world, including near Perth, Australia, although you're going to have to flip it around, and be part of our network of sundials that will be shown on our website. And there's all sorts of spiffy information there, so please go to planetary.org slash Mars. There you'll find information about the Earth dial and planetary.org slash radio to enter the planetary radio contest. Can we come up with a kit or instructions for building a wrist sundial like Fred Flintstone had? A wrist sundial?

We'll work on that one. We're all done. And we're out of time. Usually I ask people to look up in the night sky and think about something. Daniel, what should they look up in the night sky this week and think about? Pickles. All right. Look up in the night sky and think about pickles.

And from all of us here to all of you, thank you and good night. I just thought it was funny. Yes, it was. Bruce Betts and family here for this edition of What's Up. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, joins us each week here on Planetary Radio. Back to the red planet next week. The Mars Exploration Rovers aren't the only craft speeding toward it.

We'll get a status report on the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission. I hope you'll join us. Clear skies, everyone.