Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - MAVEN Mars Mission's Bruce Jakosky

Episode Date: September 16, 2013

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) orbiter leaves for the red planet in November of 2013. Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder is its Principal Investigator. Mat Kaplan sat down with Bruce at a recent MAVEN workshop.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sniffing the Escaping Atmosphere of Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We'll visit with Bruce Jakosky, leader of the MAVEN mission, leaving for the Red Planet in November. Later, we'll get a special on-the-scene what's-up from Bruce Betts, who is at Caltech celebrating 50 years of planetary science. Bill Nye is off this week as he begins his competition on Dancing with the Stars. But planetary evangelist Emily Lakdawalla is standing by for her regular report.

Emily, I'm especially grateful this week because your voice is maybe not quite up to par because you were doing some public speaking last week. Where were you? I was at the Cincinnati Observatory's annual Scope Out public event. It was really super fun, lots of people, great volunteers, and quite a big crowd for my talk, so I really enjoyed it. Excellent. Well, tell us what you're up to this week. I'm thinking especially of two pieces that are brand new as we speak, and they are both ways to explore a big asteroid. That's right. We're talking about the asteroid Vesta, which Don, of course, visited and mapped

very thoroughly. Now it's on its way to Ceres. The German Aerospace Agency has just released their third atlas for Vesta. The reason it's the Germans who are releasing this, it's Now it's on its way to series. The German Aerospace Agency has just released their third Atlas for Vesta. The reason it's the Germans who are releasing this, it's because it's a German camera that's on Dawn that took all of the photos that they used to make the Atlas. This is the highest detail Atlas they've released yet. 30 different map sheets labeled with all kinds of information and the topographic information about the asteroid. It's really beautiful and worth checking out. What kind of detail do we see here? I'm looking at the whole asteroid divided up into little sections. Well, if you look at any one of those sections, you'll get an individual map. It's divided into quads the same way that topographic map sheets for Earth are divided into quads.

These quads cover slightly more area maybe than the ones you're accustomed to seeing, but you'll see topographic contours and place names and other information like that. So what's this other way to explore Vesta? Well, there's a really cool new map-based image browser that allows you to search for and find pictures taken by Don of specific locations on Vesta. It's really quite easy to use and really a great addition to our ability to find great archived image data. And that is the second of the two blog entries that Emily did on the 16th of September. You can explore these at planetary.org and look for her blog.

She's also got a couple of recent entries having to do with LADEE, that launch that we covered last week on this program. And what we're going to be talking about today, Emily, could you just say a word about MAVEN and these videos that you posted? Yeah, MAVEN is getting ready to launch to Mars in November. And I was looking at a bunch of videos and I especially like the 10 minute long time lapse showing its assembly. It's a much bigger spacecraft than I realized it was. It has a two meter antenna. Yeah, it's huge. And we're going to be talking to the boss of that mission, Bruce Joukowsky, in just a moment or two.

Emily, very good to be talking to you. Rest your voice, and we'll talk to you again next week. All right. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. That's Emily Lakdawalla. I was at the University of Colorado Boulder a few weeks ago. The school's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics sponsored a workshop for space media types

like me so that we could learn about MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission that launches for the red planet in just two months. Many members of the MAVEN team had joined us from the many institutions that have partnered for the mission. They are led by Principal Investigator and Professor of Geological Sciences, Bruce Tukosky. Bruce also directs the university's Center for Astrobiology. He and I sat down for a conversation after a very full day of fascinating presentations. Bruce, this has been an outstanding day at LASP. I have a confession that I'm embarrassed to make,

which is that I really didn't fully appreciate this mission until hearing you and the other presenters today. This is a very important mission to tell us about Mars and its past and life. In fact, you say this is an astrobiology

mission. That's right. As a science mission, it's a little bit underappreciated because people don't understand the significance of the top of the atmosphere in the long-term history of the climate. The case has not been well made generally out with the public or even within the science community. I think that's true, and I think I'm a good example of that. But after today being carefully brought through the evidence, the data that has brought us to this stage, I think, as I said, I really deeply appreciate the significance of this mission. And it does seem that the timing of MAVEN now maybe is ideal? It is ideal timing and in a couple of different ways. One is with respect to the rest of the Mars

exploration program, MAVEN builds on measurements that have been made over the last 20 years that all point toward history of the Mars atmosphere, history of the climate, and the potential significance of loss of gas out the top of the atmosphere to space. In that sense, we're perfect timing. We're coming along with this mission to explore the top of the atmosphere, to understand what the role of escape to space has been, and how it relates back to things that are of broader interest to the Mars community and to the public. Things like the history of the geology of the surface, the history of the potential for life, the habitability of Mars.

The other way that it's good timing is with respect to the solar cycle because we're interested in exploring the influence that the sun has on the top of the atmosphere and how it relates to escape to space. And the time that we're going to get there is just after the peak in solar activity out of its 11-year cycle. It's the solar max as it's called. Yeah, we get there right after that and that's the ideal time for us to be going there.

We're seeing the most variability over the year of the mission in the extreme ultraviolet photons that are going to be hitting the planet. And just after peak is when we have the most and the most intense solar storms that can affect the upper atmosphere. So it's really ideal timing for us. Is it fair to say that learning about the history of the atmosphere on Mars will indeed tell us a lot about the history of the possible life that may have developed at some point on that planet billions of years

ago. It's such a simple question, but it has such a complicated answer because I will admit that the overarching theme of the Mars program and the highest priority science is to answer questions about life. Was there life? Was there ever life at the surface? Is there still life somewhere today? But those are really hard questions to answer and they're going to require many missions in order to do it right.

What we're trying to do with MAVEN is to understand what I think of as the boundary conditions surrounding the possible life, possible existence of life. What was the climate like? Why did it change? Why did the climate change from what seems to be an early, warmer, wetter environment to the cold, dry environment we see today? What are the key processes? today. What are the key processes? And in that sense, what controls the habitability and what controls the ability of life to exist on the surface? What controls the history of water, which clearly affects the ability of life to be present on the planet? You have quite a family of instruments to help you learn about all these things. We think we have the right instruments. We've selected the family very carefully.

We have eight science instruments on the spacecraft that really get at the important aspects of what we're trying to do. We're measuring the solar input into the planet and the response of the upper atmosphere, the response in terms of the composition and structure and of the escaping atoms. That really gives us the full end-to-end set of processes, from energy inputs to full atmospheric response.

I think you described all eight of these as your favorites. You know, it's hard not to because you get up and you point to the first one and you say, this is the key instrument. And then the second one is also the key instrument. This mission is different from a lot of other Mars missions. If you look at some of the other orbiters, it's a collection of instruments. Each one does really important science but it does it independently from the other instruments. On MAVEN, they all work together. They all interact and in some cases cases we even require data from multiple instruments

to do the analysis. And you're going to want all eight of these working during, there are certain events that are part of this mission. Some of them you've planned for just because of trajectory, because of your orbit. Others maybe not and I'm thinking things the sun may do while you're there. We're counting on that because what we want to do is see the effect of solar storms. And the sun will emit stuff in whatever direction it's going to emit it. And some of these blobs of stuff will hit Mars. And we want to see that, measure it as it's coming in, and see what the atmospheric response is. That's really going to tell us a lot.

But to do that, we need to be looking with all of our instruments. What about the orbit that this spacecraft is going to go into? It's going to be sampling some of that tenuous atmosphere. Well, let me take a step back from that. We came as close as I can imagine being possible to starting with what people would call a clean sheet of paper in designing this mission. So we went in knowing what we wanted to measure, but not having a particular bias up front as to what instruments we would measure,

what orbit we would do it from, what the characteristics of the spacecraft would be. We let the science requirements drive each of these. So we picked instruments that could make the measurements that would tell us what's going on in the upper atmosphere. We designed the spacecraft to be able to accommodate, to hold those instruments in a way that lets each one of them do the science. And a tremendous effort went into that accommodation to try to figure out how to put the instruments on the spacecraft. You know, is the spacecraft pointing at the planet? Is it pointing at the sun? How to do it all in a way that maximizes the science. The orbit is only one part of that. We wanted to pick an orbit that

allows us to pass through the entire upper atmosphere, every orbit, and sample it directly in situ at the location of the spacecraft, but then get high enough that we can do imaging of the entire visible disk of the planet so that we can extrapolate the detailed local properties in situ to global properties. We also wanted to pick an orbit that lets us move with respect to Mars. The gravitational field will apply torque to the orbit that causes it to precess. What that means is if we start out, for example, in a 2 a.m., 2 p.m. orbit,

it's going to move in local time over the course of the mission. And by picking the orbit properties, we are able to sample all of the different local times and all of the different latitudes over the course of the mission. So we've really tried to maximize every aspect of this to give us the best science return for what we're trying to get. That's Bruce Dukosky, principal investigator for the MAVEN mission, leaving for Mars in November. He'll tell us more when Planetary Radio returns. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars.

This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org.

I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're about to pick up the conversation I had with Bruce Tukosky of the University of Colorado Boulder. Bruce heads the MAVEN mission that will soon tell us about the atmosphere of Mars and why there is so much less of it than there was billions of years ago. We were talking before the break about the interesting orbital path MAVEN will follow so that it can cover all of Mars in four dimensions.

You had a great slide that actually shows this beautiful pattern as this spacecraft processes around the planet. It's a lot like what you would get if you have a spirograph. Yes, that's exactly what I thought of when I saw it. I don't know if they still make them, but you're old enough and I'm old enough to remember playing with those. And that's exactly what the orbit looks like on a chart. I love my old spirograph. That's a story for another day, I guess. How close actually will you be getting to the planet? How will you be dipping down into this atmosphere? Our orbit will have its periapsis,

its lowest point at about 150 kilometers and its highest point at about 6,000 plus kilometers. We actually target not to the altitude but to the atmospheric density. So we're aiming at a corridor between a minimum and a maximum density and we're going to be adjusting the orbit constantly to hit that, but it's around 150 kilometers. That altitude and coming in through all the altitudes above it lets us sample all of the important regions of the top of the atmosphere that control escape to space. During the course of the mission, we're also going to lower the periapsis five times in week-long campaigns to about 125 kilometers. And again, we're really targeting a particular density, but it's around 125. It doesn't seem like much going from 150 to 125, but it lets us get the full extent of the entire column of upper atmosphere,

all the way down to the part that is well mixed with the bottom of the atmosphere. You're a member of a very exclusive club. I think there are fewer principal investigators for planetary missions than there are astronauts. It's quite a position to be in, and you've been at this for, what, 10 years? It's been 10 years almost to the day since the idea for this mission and the core of the team started to get together. That was 2003. In 2006, we wrote our proposal. We did a competitive phase A where they selected a couple of teams and gave us each a little money in the better part of a year to develop the concept

better. And then in 2008, we were selected to move toward flight. So really, it's been from 2008 to now about five years as the main development phase of the mission. I will tell you, getting back to the PI comment, it's a true honor to be able to lead a mission like this. I'm sort of speechless. I just go about it every day and try to make sure we're on track and doing the right science and have the right team put together to do it. Every orbiter that goes to Mars carries with it an Electra relay. The reason for that is that we need to get data back from the rovers on the surface. It's too hard for them to do direct to earth communication, so they transfer a relay through the orbiters. It's a lot easier for them. They've been using

Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for the last decade, and I mean the Spirit and Opportunity rovers and now Curiosity. Those two orbiters, those two spacecraft are getting old now and NASA very much needed to replenish their relay capability. So as a requirement from the Mars program, we're carrying an electro relay and have the capability to do relay communications and transfer data. It's going to be a difficult balancing act, and I don't know how this is going to play out yet, because when we're doing relay communications, we're not taking our own science measurements. You're already, it looks like, beginning to work

sort of hand-in-hand with Curiosity. In fact, Curiosity made the case for MAVEN even more intriguing. Scientifically, they're very complementary, and they work very well together. Curiosity has the SAM instrument suite, surface analysis of Mars, that has some significant overlap with the MAVEN instrument. In particular, they have a mass spectrometer that Paul Mahaffey at Goddard is the lead on that measures atmospheric composition. MAVEN has a mass spectrometer that Paul Mahaffey at Goddard is the lead on that measures upper atmospheric composition. And these play together very well in terms of understanding composition, isotope ratios, and history.

and history. The SAM instrument recently announced their measurements of some of the isotope ratios that tell us directly about escape to space, and they've confirmed the inferences we've made from the Martian meteorites that escape has been a significant process. MAVEN has as its goal to understand quantitatively how much escape has occurred. Has lost to space been the dominant process? So we expect to analyze the data in conjunction with each other when we get there and to analyze the results coming out, to take their results, our results, and play them together. It's actually a very exciting possibility. So what are you looking at right now as the date when you'll begin this journey to Mars? You know, we've already begun the journey to Mars.

Here's why I think that. If you're going with your family on a vacation, you don't start counting your vacation when you arrive at the resort. You start when you pull out of the garage in your car. We stood there and watched MAVEN pull out of the garage in your car. We stood there and watched MAVEN pull out of the garage at Lockheed Martin on the back of a truck on August 2nd to start its journey. It did the same thing we do. It starts by driving to the airport. And in this case, the airport was Buckley Air Force Base, where it was loaded into the back end of a C-17 cargo jet and carried to Kennedy Space Center.

You got to fly along. I got to fly along, and that was exciting, just to be with it on the start of its journey. But what you were really asking, I think, we have a 20-day launch window that we can get off during and still get to Mars. That's November 18th to December 7th. We can even go about 10 or 12 days beyond that because we're a little bit lighter than we thought we might be, and the launch vehicle has a little bit more capability than we were afraid of.

But if we miss that launch period, it's 26 months until the planets line up again and we get another shot at it. It's 26 months till the planets line up again and we get another shot at it. And it's not just the 26 months and it's not just the dollars to keep the team going during that period. But if we delayed, we would go from the ideal time in the solar cycle to the worst time, which would be solar minimum, the least interesting time. So there's a tremendous science hit. The team is incredibly motivated to get off on time and to do whatever it takes to get to the launch pad and to light it on November 18th. And if that happens, if all goes well, orbital insertion is when? September 22nd of next year. It's 10 months to get there. After orbit insertion, we have about a five and

a half week period that we're calling transition phase during which we commission the spacecraft. And that's to do the maneuvers from our insertion orbit to get into our final science mapping orbit, to deploy the booms. We have four different booms that have to be deployed to test all of the science instruments to do a dry run of mapping and then to finally start doing science observations. Very exciting. Best of luck with all of this, Bruce. Thank you. And you know that some of us in the Planetary Society look forward to joining you at the Kennedy Space Center. And even if we don't get to, we sure look forward to celebrating this

launch of MAVEN to Mars. It's incredibly exciting to be launching a spacecraft to Mars, and thank you for your support. Thanks, everybody, for the interest we're getting in this. You're going to be able to tell momentarily that Bruce is not on the Skype line this week. In fact, we've got him on his cell phone. Where the heck are you? I am at a small university known as the California Institute of Technology or Caltech. Someplace that you're kind of proud of, your alma mater. It is. It is indeed.

And I'm actually here for the 50th anniversary of planetary science at Caltech. I can't imagine a better spot for that. No, it's great. And it's been fun to hear history as well as current science subjects. Let's tell people about what's up. All right. Well, we've got in the evening sky, you can check out Jupiter looking super bright in the middle of the night. I thought I started in the middle of the night. It's rising in the east and getting high overhead.

Oh, it's just such a pretty place there. There goes Ed Stone, project scientist, Voyager. There goes Dennis Madsen, Project Scientist for Cassini. Hey, would you do me a favor? Tell Ed Stone thank you for making us an interstellar species. He saw me and he practically started sprinting away. Hey, Ed, thanks for making us an interstellar species. Why did you make me do that?

in a very stellar space. Why did you make me do that? Once again, as I've been pondering all day, it's like, I don't think they can take my PhD away. I don't think. They wouldn't dare.

So anyway, Jupiter looking bright rising in the east in the middle of the night and then higher over and getting pretty high ahead in the pre-dawn. Also in the pre-dawn, Mars looking reddish,

dimmer down below Jupiter. And in the evening, Venus still looking stunning low in the pre-dawn. Also in the pre-dawn, Mars looking that-ish dimmer down below Jupiter. And in the evening, Venus still looking stunning low in the west shortly after sunset. For time's sake, I'm going to move it straight on to... Elvis has left the solar system. Or Voyager 1, whatever. But you can check out my video and find out if it really has left the solar system. Oh, I watched it. It's great. I'm glad you mentioned it. And what the heck the going into interstellar space actually means.

Anyway, you can find that link from our website and my blog. I just keep getting distracted. I'm sorry. So here's a random space fact from one of the Celtic PhDs in the past, Carolyn Park, who said today, if you take all of the rings of Saturn

and you smoosh them up into a moon-like thing, it would actually be smaller than or about the size of Enceladus, which is a pretty small moon. So lots and lots of glorious beauty, not a whole lot of stuff. Huh, that is a very, very nice random space fact. Just as another sort of random space fact,

you know, we were talking to Bruce Tokoski today of the MAVEN mission, and he is a Caltech connection, right? He is indeed. He has a PhD a few years before me, and he's not here. But, you know, who is here, Matt, which is our guest for the landing launch, Dave Page, also Caltech Ph.D. Did a great job with us on Planetary Radio Live. Tell him thanks again. I will, but I'm not going to yell at him if that's okay. Darn. All right. Speaking once again of Caltech, our trivia question we asked you was, what was Bruce Murray's middle name, Professor Bruce Murray?

What was his middle name? How did we do, Matt? A really nice response. You know, I put the pitch out there for everybody to get in on this because it was going to be so easy to look up, and people did respond. Even more gratifying were all the nice things that people had to say about your mentor, Dr. Murray. Oh, that's great. Here's one of them.

In fact, it's our winner. First-time winner, April Larkin. April Larkin of Essex Junction, Vermont, who said his middle name was Churchill. Indeed. Yeah, it's been interesting and kind of fun.

There have been all sorts, not surprisingly, all sorts of references to Bruce Murray today and different little anecdotes and stories. He was the first planetary science faculty member at Caltech. There were others who did planetary science, but he was the first to be assigned a faculty member in the field of planetary science. Very cool. Another random space fact. Well, April, we are going to send you the brand new Planetary Radio t-shirt.

April says, I really love this podcast. Thanks for all you do. And April, I know Bruce is very fond of you, but I actually love you as well. Can I mention a couple more real quick here? Randy Bottom, regular listener, he happens to be a proud member of the Commonwealth, not surprising, he's up in Canada. Not unlike the city in Manitoba, Dr. Murray's middle name is Churchill, my sense is that he was a force like Winston. And then from another regular listener, John Gallant, who said that asteroid 4957, Bruce Murray, all one word, is named after him,

must have been a smaller asteroid. They weren't able to fit Churchill on it. Yeah, I think it's not the asteroid side. It's the limitation on number of characters you're supposed to use. And an asteroid name, which is usually limited to 16, or and they like it even better for flight.

You are full of random space facts today. I am. I'm just brimming with them. And here's a trivia question for everyone for next time around, inspired by a talk by Mike Malin here, talking about Caltech and its ties to Mars exploration. Way back in the early, early days, before the successful first flyby of Mars of Mariner 4, there was Mariner 3. What happened to Mariner 3? And I'll give you a hint. What went wrong with Mariner 3 that had to be corrected for Mariner 4?

Go to planetary.org slash radio guest, and enter our contest to win what, Matt? Another Planetary Radio t-shirt. And you have until Monday, Monday, September 23rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that entry.

All right, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about what things I blew up when I was at Caltech. Thank you, and good night. I'm going to ask Ed Stone next time I see him. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, proud graduate of the California Institute of Technology, where he is right now celebrating 50 years of planetary science.

Actually, if you could not ask him, that would be great. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова