Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Martian Mic Drop

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

Jason Achilles, a musician who partnered with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to help put one of the first microphones on Mars, shares his journey and the joy of listening to the sounds of Mars. We also highlight an upcoming opportunity to view comet 2022 E3 (ZTF). Stick around for more on the night sky and our space trivia contest with What’s Up. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2023-Martian-mic-dropSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listening to the sounds of Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Have you heard the recordings from the red planet? After decades of effort to put a microphone on Mars, we can finally listen to the sound of the Martian wind, thanks to NASA's Perseverance rover and the teams who worked to make its two microphones a reality. In a moment, you'll hear my interview with Jason Achilles, a musician with a passion for space who used his audio prowess to help put one of the first successful microphones on Mars. We'll also share a rare upcoming opportunity to view a comet that hasn't swung by Earth in over 50,000 years.

Stick around for What's Up with Bruce Betts and this week's space trivia contest. contest. In space news, Virgin Orbit's first launch from the UK hit a major snag after it lifted off from Spaceport Cornwall on January 9th. Virgin Orbit, not to be confused with its sister company Virgin Galactic, is a company that provides launch services for small satellites. Their Launcher 1 rocket suffered an anomaly sometime after it was released from its carrier plane. It was supposed to deploy nine satellites, but sadly, none of them made it into orbit. We aren't yet sure what caused the anomaly, but hopefully we'll know more soon. Meanwhile, in the United States, Representative Frank Lucas has been named chair to the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Lucas, a Republican from Oklahoma, has served as ranking member of the Science Committee since 2019.

You can learn more about these stories and glimpse a beautiful image of frost around a crater on Mars captured by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter in the January 13th edition of our weekly newsletter, The Downlink. Read it or subscribe to have it sent to your inbox for free every Friday at planetary.org slash downlink. The coming weeks hold a special treat for anyone with their eyes on the skies. A comet from the outer solar system will be passing close to Earth for the first time in 50,000 years this month,

and you might be able to see it. Ray Paoletta, Associate Producer for the show and Director of Content and Engagement at the Planetary Society, joins us next with the icy details. Hi, Ray. Welcome back on Planetary Radio. Thanks so much. It's always great to be here. I am thrilled to be here chatting about the night sky. Yeah. And I hear there's like an exciting opportunity to see a new naked eye comet coming our way, right? Yeah, this was going to be really interesting.

So the comet is called comet 2022 E3 with ZTF in parentheses, because it was found at these wiki observatory, I believe it's, you know, we're still working on that name. It's a really interesting comet. It's taken 50,000 years to get this close again to Earth. It's fast approaching.

The last time we were able to see it, and I say we as in the human race, was actually during the Stone Age, I believe. So this should be really cool. It's always really interesting to think about, you know, what was happening the last time that a comet swung by Earth. And that context is really interesting, because now I'm just envisioning, you know, early humans kind of staring up at the sky, and I'm sure being very weirded out. Right? Like, did we have tools at that time i mean i suppose we did right we were making

some some pretty like rudimentary tools but it's it's wild to think how much has changed from the last time that this comet approached earth close enough fashion that you could see it with the naked eye but this time around probably best use binoculars if you can i know that i'll be doing my best to take a greeny, terrible iPhone picture, which is my astronomy passion, is to take horrible iPhone pictures of the moon. You can check them out online. And I'm really excited to see this. This time around, though, if you're interested in seeing the comet,

it will probably appear at the closest, if you're in the northern hemisphere, around February 1st. The closest it's going to come is about 42 million kilometers so that's roughly 26 million miles and you know if you're in a spot where it's low light pollution bright always easier to see of course with comet brightness though it's always a little bit difficult to tell how bright it's going to be we don't think it's going to be necessarily the same kind of pronounced tail that we saw in neo eyes back in 2020 it'll be more of like a greenish smudge as uh my colleague kate howells wrote in the article about it so it'll still be really cool nonetheless just setting expectations and i'll make sure to share the article on our planetary radio page for this week so if anybody wants to read the article and find out more about how you can see this comment

you can find that at planetary.org slash radio. I was going to ask Ray, have you ever seen a comet before? You know what? I don't actually think I have, which is so embarrassing and horrible for me as a space editor. I don't think I've seen one. Now that just means like, this is your chance. The only one I got to see really clearly was when I was a child, I saw Hale-Bopp and it blew my mind. I don't know if it was actually as spectacular as I remember it, but I just my little kid brain remembers it being so huge and amazing. So anytime I can encourage people to go out and check a comet, I'm so happy. Oh, yeah, totally.

No, this is my chance. I'll be looking up for sure. Well, thanks for sharing that with us, Ray. And hopefully I'll have you back on Planetary Radio soon. Absolutely. Take soon. Absolutely. Take care. Thanks. In 1996, Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan wrote a letter to NASA,

urging the agency to include a microphone on their next Mars mission. It began a 25-year-long campaign here at the Planetary Society to try to get a microphone on Mars. There were several attempts to make it happen over the years, but it wasn't until the triumphant moment that NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on the Red Planet in 2021 that the dream finally became a reality. Perseverance included not one, but two microphones on board. The SuperCam mic, which records the rover's laser zaps on the Martian rocks, among other things, and the Entry, Descent, and Landing, or EDL

microphone, which was meant to capture audio from the rover's landing, along with other sounds. Unfortunately, the EDL microphone didn't successfully record the landing noises, but the two mics have returned a wealth of Martian and rover noises to Earth. My guest this week is Jason Achilles, a self-proclaimed extraterrestrial audio engineer and president of Zandef Dexit Incorporated. He's a composer, producer, and musician whose passion for space led him on a mission

to partner with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to make the EDL Mars microphone a reality. Thanks for joining me, Jason. I'm very happy to be here. Yeah, it's really cool to get to talk to you again, because the last time I saw you in the real world, it was actually at Astronomy on Tap in Pasadena, and you were rocking out on a guitar, and it was right after a really long day for me. You know, it was the 240th American Astronomical Society.

So to cap off that adventure, it was really cool to just chill out and watch you play your guitar. Yeah. I guess to explain to people, Caltech holds an astronomy lecture every month in Pasadena. My band plays in between the speakers. And it's a very cool experience and it was great that you came. And I was kind of very struck by your music style. You call it, what, cosmic rock, right? Other people call it that. And then they ask me and I'm like, I don't know, that sounds as good. Yeah, cosmic space rock or something. It's all instrumental. It's kind of,

it's definitely got some atmospheric sort of Pink Floyd kind of qualities. And then there's more upbeat, like, I don't know, Jeff Beck meets Stevie Wonder-ish kind of, I don't know. As long as people like it and buy the t-shirts, I'm happy. Well, I definitely enjoyed it. I kept thinking, you know, I need to pick up that guitar and learn more. Well, take some financial planning classes if you want to be a musician. That's what I tell everybody. Playing an instrument isn't nearly as important as knowing how to, you know, afford to keep doing it. But, you know, you've managed to not just play music, but find a way to apply what you learned

from your musical career to something that you're very passionate about, which is space exploration. And that's part of why I wanted to talk to you, because ever since I learned that I was going to be the new host of Planetary Radio, I've been making these schemes to talk to you about this, because I feel like that's so relatable and inspiring that you went from rock star to this Mars microphone program. How did that happen? Yeah, well, I tell people I basically have started an aerospace career just to pay for the music one, which is honestly kind of sort of how it's been working out lately.

It's been going pretty well. Basically, I contacted, I sort of cold called NASA in the middle of, I think it was like summer of 2016, something like that. And I'd heard that there was going to be a microphone flow in a couple months. And I thought, well, if I'm ever going to get, you know, into the space world, this is actually something I know something about, which is audio. And I had a cursory working knowledge of rover systems and things like that, just from being a fan of that stuff. And so I pitched myself as sort of an audio consultant and said, like, hey, if you guys need anybody, I'm in. And it turned out they, they actually did. They had sort of recently spec'd out. They were going to have a mic as part

of the EDL system, the entry descent landing system, which is separate from super cam, which is a microphone that at least at the time of this recording, just released some more audio. But these are two, there's two different microphones on perseverance. And so then I had to put together a team of engineers to basically do the more technically specific aspects of that study that I didn't know how to do. You know, I understood enough about what I'd seen on the specs and thought, okay, I think I can be of value here. But then how do you apply fluid dynamics equations to acoustic research and stuff like that? I had no idea. So I've got an idea now, but I had them teach me as we went through it. So I found these couple of brilliant audio engineers,

Brad Avinson and Cesar Garcia, who also happens to be, just happens to be a former Olympic diver, you know, one of these complete underachievers in life. So we got hired beginning of 2017. We did a two month study. We were initially hired to create something kind of from scratch. And then we said we could do it. We told them how much it would cost. They said, okay, well, we can't afford that. But now we would like your help to basically choose an off-the-shelf component. And so that's what we did. We were brought back in to help Dave and the team. Dave Gruhl, who hired us at JPL, he was our supervisor at JPL and he was the one spearheading everything. And he had a couple of ideas. He was our supervisor at JPL and he was the one spearheading everything. And he had a couple of ideas. There was a company that had released this new product that was a good contender for various technical reasons. But actually, the microphone I'm talking to you on

now is a flight analog of the Mars EDL mic. So this is the exact same microphone. This was one of the test models that I still have. This is a flight analog. This is a DPA-4006 capsule into an MMA preamp, which is the exact same thing that was flown on Perseverance. They had a few very minor modifications, but acoustically it's identical. And if you'll notice, my voice sounds very clear. And that's why when people check out the audio recordings, you'll hear there's a clarity to these recordings that's incredible, especially if you check out Sol 16, which is a drive sequence. I mean, it's like your ear is right there. It's not muffled or anything.

We did have to process the audio a bit to remove some background noise, but the actual sound is untweaked, as it were. Yeah, and it's absolutely astonishing. I mean, I know it's just kind of the sound of wind and things like that. But I mean, getting sound from the surface of another world is so mind blowing. It's pretty cool. Yeah, I had this deep emotional moment listening to it. And I know it resonated with other people, because, you know, I'm like, I need to share this with everyone. And at the time, I was working as digital community manager at the Planetary Society. So I took that first bit of audio,

and I slapped it over a picture of a Perseverance panorama and put it up online. And to this day, it is still the most watched video I've ever created in my entire career. And that is, I mean, that just speaks to the interest. It's funny because audio is discarded very readily as scientific validity sometimes. I think people sort of think of audio maybe the way they think of a painting or something. It's like this arbitrary, you know, collection of... It's more thought of as being beautiful than useful, right? But then, you know, the imagery that we've been getting for decades from space,

that's scientific imagery, is clearly regarded as such. But now that we're getting potential scientific use audio, it's still a hard sell, I think, for some people. And it's also, the problem is, you know, audio is tricky. There's a lot of work we've done to make sure that everything we're doing is very authentic, you know, with how we're treating this stuff. I tell people, if you want to understand the importance of audio, just put earplugs in and walk around for a day, and you'll rapidly realize how much more frustrating it is just not hearing normal audio cues. I don't know. We think of it as enjoyment, but it really is. There's a reason it's a sensory system. Absolutely. There's so much that we can learn kind of, you know, about Mars because

the conditions there in the air chemically and the atmospheric density, it's very different from what we have here on Earth. And, you know, how does that impact the sounds that we're hearing from this microphone? Well, I mean, ultimately, I think, you know, people would ask me before this thing landed, you know, okay, assuming this thing works, what do you expect to hear? And the analogy I like to give is that it's sort of like if you were walking through the middle of Death Valley, what would you hear? You would hear yourself walking through the middle of Death Valley and not much else, you know, and you hear a little bit of atmospheric stuff. But really, to me,

I think the exciting part is hearing the sound of your own footsteps on Mars, except in this case, it's rover wheels. But you know, one day will be our footsteps. And then the audio becomes more useful. You know, if you're working on the surface, if you're drilling something, or you're in loose terrain, and you can you can hear these things, it's going to increase mobility. It'll increase your mental stability because you can actually, it's one of the few sensory awarenesses that we can give you a pretty accurate perception of. You're never going to smell Mars, not really. You're never going to feel a gust of Martian wind on your face, but you can hear the audio. We can treat the audio in such a way where it's absolutely what you would hear if you were to hold your face, but you can hear the audio. We can treat the audio in such a way where it's absolutely what you would hear

if you were to hold your breath, not, you know, depressurize, it was horribly dry and it was sticking your head out the window on Mars. But it'll be one of the few sensory experiences that will be accurate. You'll never feel the unfiltered sunlight touch your face on Mars the way you do when you walk out your porch.

It's a different experience, you know. Audio is one of the few things we can give you that will be absolutely correct. I think what's cool for me about recording sounds on Mars is, yes, the wind is beautiful, but we can learn some really cool things just by listening to the sounds of the lasers pew-pewing off the rocks there and learn more about their chemical makeup and density and things like that. So there are scientific applications for this. And that's why it's fun for me because as someone that works at the Planetary Society, we've been advocating for Mars microphones for literally over 25 years, you know, and it finally happened. Yeah, that's actually how I first, when i first got this gig and did all the

research and realized that you guys had been the ones you know supporting this since before carl sagan passed away supported the first microphone which flew on uh mars polar lander that was when i reached out to jim bell who was the president at the time and that's how i think probably what eventually how you and i met yeah anytime i give like one of those like history talks a champion the planetary society and everyone cheers they you got a lot of fans out there. That makes me so happy. And I know you've got to feel really happy about your role actually getting this Mars microphone there because, correct me if I'm wrong, but you've been a Planetary Society member since you were very young, right?

Well, I was, well, I'll be fair. It actually did expire, but I was a member of the Planetary Society when I was like eight years old. That's wonderful. My mom, my parents had signed me up and I still haven't, like, somewhere I've got a newsletter or something. And I was a member of two fan clubs as a kid

and it was you guys and the Weird Al Yankovic, close personal friends of Al. Yes. Got a lot of fans of Weird Al here at the Planetary Society. It's hard to beat Al, you know. But I did want to say, though, because you mentioned the laser. So something that I really want people to hear that are listening to this, we recently posted a sound file that's

really, really cool because, as far as I'm aware, at least, it's the first publicly released sound of Mars in stereo. There's two microphones on there. And the team that's responsible for SuperCam, at one point, they told me about this earlier this year, that they had activated both microphones during one of those laser firing sequences. And they never released it because they weren't able to get the audio from our microphone enough to where people would be able to hear it. But we've been using this really high-end audio processing software. It's very surgical and very intensive, but we were able to clean up the sound enough where we could hear these pops. So then we were able to reconstruct

and match up these two different audio files, which were in two totally different places online. So we put them together. It's 30 popping sounds in succession, which are these tiny little laser ablations over like a 13 second period or something like that. They go pretty quick, but basically the EDL mic is on the left. The super cam mic is on the right positionally. I think their microphone was in a much better spot because it has to be. So ours was a lot quieter, but we were able to balance it out and it's yeah, it's stereo on Mars. It's pretty, pretty pretty darn cool it is i i love going back to all these websites and hearing these i don't know i want everyone to get an opportunity to just you

know close your eyes listen to the sounds of mars but i did want to ask you about the edl camera actually because i i know the original plan is to try to get some sound from the landing on mars to go along with that beautiful footage that Perseverance captured of the landing. And then I just kind of never heard anything else about that audio. And then heard later that it just didn't get captured. So what happened there? That one was a big bummer. And it was funny because, so Dave Gruhl, who was our supervisor, as I had mentioned before, was the one who, if folks might remember, Perseverance landed on a Thursday and then press conference was

the following Monday. And so they were really scrambling to get all that multimedia stuff back by then. That's when they shared the video with the up and down cameras on the SkyCrane and all that incredible stuff. What had happened, yeah basically the the mic was activated and it recorded what i was told is that basically there was a like a communications issue between the digitizer and the computer on board perseverance which is essentially like for people that work in a recording studio or have ever used analog digital converters that you like hook up to a laptop every once in a while you turn them on and they just don't work. And you just,

you, you turn it off and turn it on again. And it's, as I say, it's like a hundred percent of the time it works right. The second time, but this was, this was a problem.

I guess I wasn't aware that this was something they'd experienced. And I guess it happened infrequently, but it happened a few times during testing and just the nature of the mission. There wasn't really any opportunity to get it straightened out. And so it was kind of, it was an unfortunate occurrence that it happened then. But you know, that's okay. It just means we're going to have to do it again. Right.

Send microphones to other worlds, at least the ones that have atmospheres that we can kind of listen to. Well, and what Dave did that weekend, which was really cool, is he managed to get another recording event before that press conference, and it worked fine that time. So when Monday came along,

I actually rewatched it again. It was really interesting. He sold it really well, where he's like, well, we didn't get the audio, sorry. But here's some great video, right? And then everyone kind of forgets about the audio. And then he kind of brings it back. He's now however we did get this and he plays 17 seconds since that first little gust of wind that came back that was captured on soul 2 from this mic

and uh somehow like i thought everyone was gonna be super disappointed but now everyone was like oh it's amazing and yeah kudos to d Dave for making that work and getting it done. You know, space is hard. Space is hard. You know, kids, they say that and you think, oh, yeah, yeah. But then you do it and you're like, oh, God, yeah, space is really hard. Yeah, it took several attempts for us to actually get a microphone to Mars. So, if you could, if you had infinite resources, what other worlds would you want to send microphones to? could if you had infinite resources, what other worlds would you want to send microphones to?

Well, I lobbied really hard to become part of the Dragonfly mission to Titan. Oh, yeah. Because we did get a little bit of sound from European Space Agency's Huygens probe when it landed on Titan. But I mean, Dragonfly, it was kind of. We'll count it. It was a sonification of acoustic pressure data it's you know not the same it's not the same it's definitely better than nothing but i i did talk to them you know i don't know officially but my understanding is that they are working to include an audio component i offered my services most diligently but they're basically basically like, nah, we got this. I am working with some other folks on a couple different missions for Venus, and we're going to

see if we can get some audio going there, which is not the first time. The Russians actually did do this back right in 1981. And the Venera missions? Venera 13, yeah, had a microphone, which I would guess that that mic that they flew on that thing probably weighs close to what the whole probe is gonna weigh for like russian 70s engineering everything i think the weren't the probes like five tons or something like oh gosh i don't know but i'd believe it insanely heavy and the microphone i i've been it's really hard to find any literature about this as far as i can tell it was just all completely solid stainless steel i'm sort of guessing based on pictures i saw it looked like it was maybe about the size of a large beer can or something,

like solid metal, you know. And we're hoping to send something much similar to this. And I've been working with Rocket Lab, who's sending a private mission there. We've been sort of preemptively cleared to include a mic on that mission, but the whole mission just got delayed for a few years. So we'll see what happens. But we've actually, I've already purchased the flight hardware and hopefully that'll go. And then there's the DaVinci probe to Venus. We'll see if we can get something going there. Oh, that's so exciting. I would love to hear the sounds of Venus.

Well, I think that those are both atmospheric probes. So they're basically falling very fast through the atmosphere, right? Get the whoosh on the way down. Yeah, you get the whoosh and you get some mechanical sounds. But the ones that, what I really would like to do is get something flight qualified so that next time we send hot air balloons, they can float, you know, in that sort of 50 kilometer high weather balloons, basically. And then you can really just listen and maybe, you know, if you can hear the thunder from

those lightning storms, the theorized lightning storms on Venus, something like that would be, I think, just the coolest thing ever. We'll be right back with the rest of my interview with Jason Achilles after this short message. There is so much going on in space science and exploration, and we're here to share it with you. Hi, I'm Amber, Digital Community Manager for the Planetary Society. Hi, I'm Amber, Digital Community Manager for the Planetary Society. Catch the latest space exploration news, pretty planetary pictures, and Planetary Society publications on our social media channels.

You can find the Planetary Society on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. I hope you'll like and subscribe so you never miss the next exciting update from the world of planetary science. Any sound from a lightning storm on any other world would be amazing, so you never miss the next exciting update from the world of planetary science. place in time when we can even begin to imagine and to build these missions that are going to be, you know, not just landing on a place like one of Saturn's moons, you know, like Titan, but sending back audio and video as well. It's next level. And every time we take one of these steps, it feels like, well, of course we were going to do that. But no, it's mind blowing to me every time. I can't tell you how many times I've cried just watching that perseverance landing video. I should be over it by now,

but I'm not. you know, what gets me every time is scientists crying. There's the landing and it's, but it's, it's, I think what really terrors me is when you hear the voice of the announcer, I made the mistake of what,

like the day before Perseverance landed, Rob Manning, who is, he's worked on like everything over there. Rob Manning's, he's amazing. Right. And he put together this video or podcast where he's basically talking about

entry, descent, landing, and basically just like so terrifying because he basically takes you through how actually hard all this is. Before watch this video i'm like i this would probably be okay we did this before sky crane yeah and you watch that video on the end of it you're like there's no way there's absolutely no way there's 20 000 things that are going to go wrong and then when you're listening to the landing the next day you know know, when that thing touched down, yeah, I broke down.

I was like, I can't believe it. And we, at that point, we didn't even know if the mic worked or not. It was just like the fact that didn't smash into a million pieces was like, people have no concept of how hard this stuff is. It's just very cool. Right. And to go from there to capturing sounds on Mars and then actually having a little helicopter roll out of the belly of the rover and land and just took a took around Mars like like it was easy. And it's still doing it. It's still flying. Things crazy. As far as I know, it's still flying. Yeah, I believe so. It's wild. I was surprised it worked at all, let alone, you know, into the changing seasons.

I was surprised it worked at all, let alone into the changing seasons. I'll tell you what, that's something else I've been laboring towards is trying to get some audio on the next round of helicopters that they fly out. You just get something strapped onto that little tiny little mic and you can hear it flopping around, bouncing off the ground. It'd be amazing. Yeah. I was going to ask about how much does your microphone for Mars weigh? Like, would it add a lot if you added it on a dragonfly, for example?

So there's a lot of different kinds of mics, right? Like the one I'm talking to now is probably, it's on the heavier side. For Perseverance, it was okay because we had a mass limit of, I think they wanted it to be under about 50 grams, which is, it's light, but you can feel, you know, you can feel it in your palm. It's not a feather or something, but the mass constraints on that Mars helicopter are basically, it literally must weigh nothing. But there's kind of like, there's the kind of microphones you have in cell phones and things like that, MEMS microphones, and even the SuperCam microphones are much smaller. The actual active element in it is much lighter than

ours but there's trades these things you know and so there's some new technologies of mem style mics that i think would be that's what i'm actually working right now towards getting thermally and radiation tested to see if we could fly one of those as a uh tech demonstration on the next mars mission because uh you really don't know until you get there. I mean, you can put things in test chambers and, you know, but you don't really know until you get there. And especially with something like mics where like, you know, you're flying through deep space for six months. I mean, you evaluate the materials. Okay. And we make sure we don't have any materials that are going to exhibit off gassing and, you know, the vacuum of space,

things like that. But at the same time, you're like, this was not made for this. Like this mic I'm talking to you guys on was not made to go into space. It wasn't, for example, the factory will say, okay, this thing's been tested to negative 40 degrees Celsius. I don't know why, but that's what they tested you. That doesn't necessarily mean it stops working in negative 40. It just means that's what I've been tested to. So you got to put it in your own chambers and then you have to put it through vibe tests and, and, you know, all these things, some of the audience might be more familiar with, but one of the worst parts about getting anything into space is just the, when it's got to go up on the rocket and it gets shaken to pieces and that washes out a lot of tech, you know, then there's cosmic radiation, all these other things that again, want to kill you. So.

Right. And your original spec for this microphone was very different. You had to go with these kind of off-the-shelf components, but is there anything from your original design that you really wish you could have had on this mission? Well, the actual capsule itself was the identical. Cool. Yeah, we would have bought this capsule anyway and integrated it into a custom preamplification system.

The only thing that would have been very cool that we had built into our initial design is that there was going to be a second mic of a different design mainly for you know so if one fails hopefully the other one works because they're different technologies and being affected differently by the environment but ideally if they both worked you'd have a built-in stereo mic we did put together that one stereo audio but that was kind of a fluke that even got recorded. And it technically is in stereo, but it doesn't sound very good compared to what it'll sound like when we do proper stereo on Mars. And that's the biggest, I don't want to say regret, because it will happen. But it would have been wonderful to have that capability the first time around just you know gives you something to go back for or you know incorporating a small

speaker on there for uh you know tonal calibration and playing some david bowie or you know whatever you can work in i was gonna say you know just what are you gonna sing to the rover you know there's um i got an idea a couple things it's actually something i'm gonna have to talk to you guys about but we'll we'll discuss that another time we'll discuss i'm excited to hear this i know that once your time working at jpl kind of ended you were still seeking ways to still be involved in space exploration and you're working on a whole new project now right what's going on with that you know when i knew my space career was going to come to an end if I didn't start something up soon, and I really didn't want to come to an end because this is the coolest, exciting, it's just, it's awesome. I love this stuff. And so the whole idea for

recording audio on Mars or any other planet came from was actually initially wanting to see the sky crane maneuver, but from a remote perspective. And so the initial idea was to take a camera. And as the sky crane maneuver was happening, we would eject this little camera ball with a camera inside it and a protective housing basically. And it would be recording from before you ejected it, it would hit the ground, bounce a little bit, but not too far. And you'd be able to watch the sky crane maneuver, but it would, you'd actually be able to see it from the perspective of all the animations we've seen, which nobody's ever seen.

We've seen the top view, the down view, but it's a totally different thing when you can be looking at it from a short distance away. It's like watching a rocket launch on the rocket versus standing next to it. And that's where the audio component thought came from. Because at the time, the friend of mine that I shared that with at JPL was like, it's too close to the mission. There's no way they're going to go for this kind of wacky new technology

that nobody's done before. But then we're like, well, what about audio? And then it turned out while we were having that discussion, NASA was planning to include audio. So it all worked out. But I went back to that idea a few years ago while we were waiting for Perseverance to land, basically, and got together a team of this engineering company named Honeybee Robotics, who is now actually part of Mars Sample Return. They just got a huge $20 million contract or something.

They're an engineering company in Altadena right down the street there from JPL. And I pitched this idea to them and they loved it. And so they got behind it and sunk some money into supporting it. And we built an early prototype and then we were able to get funded through NASA for a little over half a million dollars for an early development grant, which allowed us to test it on an actual rocket flight, but on earth, like a suborbital rocket test. And so we did that about a year ago, I think. Yeah. Yeah, I saw the footage of that in the Mojave Desert, right?

Yeah. It was really wild to just kind of see, you know, these little GoPros and balls, essentially, just kind of jettisoning off the side of rockets and then just looking back at the landing. I mean, anytime you get one of those moments when you can like see a spacecraft doing its thing, that's just wild. And I imagine what it would be like to just watch a lunar landing with one of these things. Yeah, that's what I want. I want some, you know, the future, the current five-year-old future astronauts of this world to see that, you know, and like, wow, you know, they just, I want that to be normalized you know it's like oh another rocket landing on another planet that we get to watch yeah yeah that's the point the video for

that if people want to go to my website jasonachilles.com and you can see the video that we that we got in the desert and basically you can imagine you would see exactly what you're seeing in this video except instead of in mojave, it would be, you know, on Mars or the moon. That's what we're doing now. We're basically looking to get more funding to get this thing flight qualified for space travel. There's a lot of private landers going to the moon in the next few years. There will be, you know, bigger missions to Mars coming soon. And so we want on board and we'll see what happens just one more way to make space more accessible and exciting for everyone you know i think exciting is yeah that's the key right i mean probably you guys are all like this you know a lot of engineers in the aerospace world are like

this too where you say like well when did you get excited in space and it's like well they were like about five six years old and it was something depending on how old they are maybe it was the apollo landings or maybe it was the Apollo landings, or maybe it was the space shuttle, or this stuff is, you know, people are like, well, why do we send people to other worlds? Because it's inspiring, you know? And why would you not do something like that?

Yeah, it costs a few bucks, but so does a lot of other way dumber stuff that we do. And, you know, yes, it's money. And yes, that money goes into a lot of jobs here on earth but how do you how do you put a price tag on that level of hope and inspiration and international collaboration i mean i was six years old when i decided that i wanted to dedicate my life to space see there you go five six years old. Boom. And here you are, you know, educating, inspiring kids and adults. And yeah, how do you put a price tag on it? I mean, I guess you could work it out in terms of like, you know, tax revenue and support, public support and funding for things. But, you know,

I mean, nobody says it better than Carl Sagan, right? And he talks about us being a nomadic species by definition. And he says this much more poetically than i do you know the if we didn't have the intrinsic to desire to explore we would never have survived this long like exploration is a necessary fundamental part of of our existence just the same as procreation you know you can't stay sedentary as a species you know we're exercising exercising our evolutionarily implied right to explore, you know, and this time we don't have to subjugate anybody or step on anybody's heads or, you know, maybe there's some microbes that might be a little mad at us. But for the first time, humanity can exercise these feelings of exploration and, you know, you could even say conquest of this new terrain, but without actually doing anything terrible to other humans. You know, and there's something really, I think, deeply honorable about that level of exploration, you know, and taking a lot of technologies that were developed for warfare, you know, rocketry and all these things and putting them towards exploration and science

and imagination. It's good stuff. Good, good. Go, go humans. Well said. Just personally, I'd like to thank you for the role that you played in bringing us Mars microphones and helping bring to life this thing that Carl Sagan wanted back, you know, a few years after our founding. I think he would have been really excited to listen to the sounds of Mars. And that's a thing now.

We get to look forward to a future where that's just a thing now. It's amazing. People should do themselves a favor and just go to YouTube and Google Carl Sagan message to Mars. And if you're not tearing up at the end of that, you might want to see a therapist because it's really it's and it was recorded the just the same year he died. I mean, that's that's a true poet and science communicator saying all the things that we've been stumbling through. But it really is beautiful. And yeah, he outlines it all pretty well. And thank you for doing this. I mean, science communication is so vital now. And now's the right time to inspire all these kids, you know?

Absolutely. And that's part of why I'm so, so happy that after years of work, we finally launched our Planetary Academy program for kids. It's our kids membership program. You know, I know you joining the Planetary Society as a kid was already exciting, but just imagine having that packet that's just for you. I feel such pride just being even a little part of that because I know how much that would have meant to me as a kid. So I'm hoping that there's a whole new generation of kids out there that are getting excited about space. And maybe someday the next person who takes on planetary radio will be one

of those kids that read one of those packets as a child. That would blow my mind. I'll tell you, I've been the last couple of years with all this going on with the Mars Audio, I've spoken to a lot of classrooms and a lot of young kids and space is just, it seems to be a level of cool that even like jaded high schoolers can't really turn away from, which is pretty impressive. You know, like I think anything less than an astronaut and they're like, you know, but astronauts still wins. Well, making more astronauts one recording at a time. Heck yeah. Well, thanks for being with me, Jason.

I really appreciate it. And hopefully I'll hear more from you in the future when some other cool, amazing microphone gets put on another world. Thanks so much, Jason. I can't wait to see Jason's next Astronomy on Tap concert. But more importantly, before we move on to this week's What's Up, please enjoy this short clip of the wind on Mars. You know, usually I am not super happy about the wind buffeting a microphone here on Earth. But when I sit back and really think about the fact

that we have recordings of the breeze on another world, it's just one more reminder of the amazing things that can happen when we work together to explore the universe around us. And now it's time for What's Up with Dr. Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. I am joined once more by the ever-amazing Bruce Betts. Welcome back, Bruce.

Hello, incredible Sarah. See, I like this, being nice to each other. It confuses me very much, but I like it as well. So, Bruce, what's up? Well, planets coming together. Venus and Saturn going to snuggle up next to each other, but they're low in the western horizon shortly after sunset. Venus looking super bright like it does.

Saturn looking yellowish, and they will get closer until the 22nd, and then they will grow apart with Saturn slipping out of sight. And Venus coming up higher and being with us for several months of me telling you, hey, it's super bright Venus over low in the west in the early evening, although it'll get higher. And if you follow a line from those guys up, you'll get to Jupiter looking bright and follow that line across to almost the other side of the sky and high up above, you'll find Mars, which is making a nice pairing with Aldebaran, the reddish star in Taurus, with Mars being the brighter one for now anyway. It continues to dim as it gets farther away from the Earth. I was just outside in between torrential rainstorms and back in the normal clear skies of Southern California last night, and the winter constellations are looking lovely in the evening.

We've got Orion and all of its friends up high in the evening. So check those out as well. Are you one of the people that goes outside and just like points up at the shiny object and says, look, it's Mars because I am frequently that person. And I wonder if I'm alone. No,

I am totally that person. And my dogs are like, Oh, cool. See, at least your dogs are, you know, in some way related to you. I'll be out there talking to total strangers. Hey, you see that shiny thing?

Yeah, no, I like to do that. People usually stay interested at least through one or two bright planets, and then they get scared and walk away. Let me give you my full TED Talk on the Pleiades. I'd watch that. All right, we move on to this week in space history 1986 voyager 2 flies past uranus giving us our one and only spacecraft flyby so far of uranus and its friends that by friends i mean moons and rings well you get it 2006 headed to the outer

solar system another spacecraft launches new horizons off off towards Pluto and Eric Hoth and deep, deep space. And so that's our This Week in Space History this week. And I remember that day that the first images from Pluto came back. I literally had them printed and I was running around my work just like, have you seen Pluto? Have you seen Pluto? Have you seen Pluto? To this day, I still encounter people that have no idea that we flew by Pluto and took images of it. No, it's actually the outline of the Disney character Pluto. Let's go on to random space fact. So I just want to mention for those who aren't familiar with how important explosive bolts are in space exploration, it just sounds terrifying.

But these pyrotechnic systems or pyros are on pretty much every rocket and spacecraft out there to separate things. So I know the Perseverance and Curiosity had 76 pyros that had to successfully blow to break the connections at the right times as they landed. SLS, Orion, they're just everywhere. They're omnipresent. These little explosives inside bolts and nuts to make them break at the right time. I just think it's cool, and I want to make sure the world knew. Yeah, what's interesting about space exploration is that there are so many

ways that things can explode and only a few of them are the good ones but they're the ones that we need to actually do the thing it's like that and fireworks are my favorite types of explosions well yeah yeah these are very small they're just enough they're very localized shape to break apart a connection holding a rocket down holding fairings on or holding upper stage thingies to lower stage thingies that's the technical term all right we go on to the trivia question in deference to the gamers out there i asked you about an an old-timey video game that was related to the solar system in such an important way. I asked you what planetary system was the setting for the majority of the original Doom video game. How'd we do?

We did really well, actually. Better than expected. It took me quite a while to go through just the massive amounts of people that came in for the trivia contest this week. Of course, people who are gamers or fans of old video games will know that the original Doom video game was actually set on Mars, or rather, I think it was partially set on one of its moons. Phobos, is that correct? Yes, it was mostly on Phobos. I believe some on Deimos and parts of the games I never got to, but I believe it was a space marine. I don't know. That's usually the thing stationed on Mars who went up to Phobos. And of course his entire group got killed and he had to work his way for some

reason through level after level of hideous monsters, which is totally the way Phobos is. Totally. But the dice have spoken. And this week we have two winners. First winner is Jean-Marc Bonnard from Lausanne, Switzerland. And winner number two is Tim Johnson from Walnut Creek, California, who wrote in, long-time listener, first-time caller, classic.

There are two things I loved in my childhood in the 90s, outer space and video games, which I relate to a lot. So I hope both Jean- John Mark and Tim Johnson enjoy their beautiful images of Matt Kaplan that are signed by him. Matt Kaplan, of course, Planetary Radio's creator and former host. Yeah, I've got a huge poster of him on my wall, but he refuses to sign it. Anyway, moving along, what else you got? Yeah, well, we also had a bunch of different messages come in from people, many of them gaming related, but I did really like this one.

It's from longtime listener, Mel, briefly Frogger Master Powell from Sherman Oaks, California, who said in law school X years ago, a bunch of us went to a Westwood Village arcade one evening and for about two hours while surrounded by teens, I had the high score on Frogger. Still a career and life highlight. Wow, that is. We also got a message from Neil Ashelman from Bettendorf, Iowa. He says, for the first time at Astra, Sarah, congrats on a wonderful wonderful first episode and thanks for including me in the audio welcome. It was a treat. And if anybody out there hasn't listened to my first show that came

out on January 4th, we added a cute compilation of all the wonderful audio messages that we got from people who called into our hotline. So thank you, Neil. I really enjoyed your message and all of the other messages from people who called in. Excellent. All right. I think it's time for this week's space trivia question. All right. Speaking of sounds from space, whose voice was the first to be broadcast from space? Whose voice was the first to be broadcast from space? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. We'll see how many people get this one right. And this week we will be selecting two winners

and the prize is a NASA International Space Station 2023 calendar. And of course, by the time you receive it, January will probably be over, but there are still 11 more months in this trip around the sun for you to use the calendar. But if you would like to join the Space Trivia Contest for this week, you have until Wednesday, January 25th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us your answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about your favorite date on a calendar. Thank you and good night. That was Bruce Betts, the Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society.

We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week with Scott Bolton, the Principal Investigator for NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our Mars-crazed members. You can join us as we continue to cheer for microphones on space missions at planetary.org slash join. Mark Hilverda and Ray Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser.

And until next week, Ad Astra.