Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Microrovers Exploring With Bruce Betts

Episode Date: January 17, 2011

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Itty Bitty Roving Explorers, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The micro-rovers are coming, and they are going to help us explore the solar system. At least that's the thinking of a group that has been looking at the role of these small, but possibly very capable robots as we look toward human missions to the Moon, asteroids, and Mars. Our own Dr. Bruce Betts leads the work. He'll tell us the hows and whys of tiny rovers in a few minutes.

And he'll stick around for our usual What's Up conversation, including a listener's suggestion of a technology to test in microgravity that took us by surprise. Bill Nye is thinking about life on Mars again. We'll hear from him right after our regular visit with the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator and mistress of its blog, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, good to be talking to you once again. I thought that maybe we could start with some of the pretty pictures that you've put up on the web, including some moons that you could almost imagine are skating on the rings of Saturn.

Yeah, it kind of amazes me that Cassini's pictures just never, ever get old. And all you have to do is get at least two moons together in one shot, and it's immediately a wow image. And one of the recent images that I just posted has five moons in one shot, including three of the big round icy ones, which I don't remember seeing all together in one shot before. So it's pretty cool. Go check it out. To say nothing of the rings in the same shot.

Well, the rings are everywhere. It's kind of hard to avoid them. So yeah. And when Cassini sees them edge on, you forget that it's a ring system that's 120,000 kilometers across. And the moons you're looking at are usually just a few hundred kilometers across, but they're compressed into this line across the screen. So that's kind of cool. Let's talk a little bit about a story that you put up a while ago, provided evidence of the fact that you get some joy out of being corrected. That's right. Especially when I find out that scientists are reading my blog. I know that a lot of scientists read the blog. I have conversations with them at scientific conferences, and they comment about things that they've read. I hear it from them, too.

And scientists, being scientists, like to point out when other people are wrong. And I'm very happy to get those corrections. I got one from Mike Malin recently, who's the head of the Mars Global Surveyor Camera and also of the Context Camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And he explained to me that a feature that I had described as an esker in a high-rise image, I probably shouldn't have used that word

because esker implies an origin. If you call it an esker in a high-rise image. I probably shouldn't have used that word because esker implies an origin. If you call it an esker, this is a sinuous ridge that you see on another planet. If you call it an esker, then that means that you're pretty sure it's glacial in origin. And he said, you can't be all that sure. There are an awful lot of these raised sinuous ridges on Mars. In fact, most of them are probably inverted channels, which are channels that once formed as normal channels do by being eroded into the plains. And then they got filled in with some stuff that turned out to be more resistant to erosion than the country rock. And so as time went on and the country rock got deflated by the wind blowing away dust, you wind up with a ridge in a place where there used to be a channel.

But in either case, you can't really be positive about what these things are. So he said he would suggest calling them sinuous ridges, which doesn't imply a genetic origin and just calls it like it is. And it's just a fascinating story. I recommend that people take a look at it on the blog that you can find at planetary.org. The images are quite, quite good. And there's much more to the story. Another little thing for people to find there is a tiny little animation that looks like something from the earliest days of filmmaking, like Edison's

The Sneeze. Yeah, you know, most people aren't familiar with snowy TV sets anymore in this day of cable and satellite, but radar images of asteroids always remind me of snow in between the channels on the TV set. But these images, even though they look a little noisy at first, you realize how amazing they are. This particular animation came from the Goldstone radio telescope, which got a view of an asteroid that was more than 8 million kilometers away. And it's just mind-boggling how far that is. And you can see it very clearly tumbling over and over in this radar image.

It's quite fascinating again. Emily, as always, I wish we had more time, but we're out. So we'll talk to you again next week. All right, Matt. See you then. She is Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Next, we won't have to wait for What's Up to hear from Bruce Betts this week. He'll be here to talk about micro rovers after we hear from Bill.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, executive director of the Planetary Society. And this week, the news in space is on Earth. And it's kind of old news. Wait, it's new. Here's what happened. People looked at the data from the Phoenix lander, which was just a couple years ago in 2008, and they realized that this wet experiment they did indicated that the Martian soil has these compounds in them that are loaded with oxygen and chlorine, perchlorates.

Now, perchlorates are also used in cleaning compounds. And people thought that since they'd wiped down the spacecraft with perchlorate towels back in 1976, that when the Viking spacecraft did an experiment, what they're really detecting was evidence of the cleaning compound. But oh no, my friends, based on evidence from the Phoenix lander 32 years later, and then taking soil from the Atacama desert, driest place on Earth, and adding a little perchlorate and doing the same experiment, they got the same results that Viking got back in the disco era, which were updated by Phoenix in the recent era, where we

have what? Alternative rock. Anyway, the thing is, these rocks on Mars contain something that has carbon in it, has an organic compound in it. And do you know where you get organic compounds? From living things, from organisms. Now this doesn't mean that there were living things on Mars. It means there might be. There might have been living things on Mars. And maybe in the extraordinary case, we go to some slushy place near the equator on Mars, there will still be some Martian microbes living now. That is worth the price of a couple of fancy cups of coffee for each taxpayer every few years. That would be exciting. If we find evidence of living things on Mars or stranger still life on Mars by keeping track of data taken 30 years ago,

updated three years ago. This is exciting stuff. This could, dare I say it, change the world. I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. Everybody loves rovers, right? And these robotic emissaries of humankind have been getting progressively bigger. This year we'll see the launch of the biggest yet, when Curiosity, the Mars science laboratory, leaves for the red planet. But big things can also come in small packages. That's why the Planetary Society has been part of a current investigation into the value of so-called micro-rovers.

A fellow named Bruce Betts has been leading the study of how these machines might help us reveal the secrets of worlds around our solar system. He is the director of projects for the Planetary Society. That's where I recently spoke with him. Dr. Betts, such a pleasure to meet you finally after all these years. I'm a big admirer. I'm sorry. I really don't know anything about you. Well, there's this radio show. Never mind.

Oh, is that why we have these microphones here? We'll spend the whole time being cute if we don't get into this. Yeah, that's what What's Up is for. I got one more cute thing. This part's serious. All right, fine. One more cute thing. John Kotick, the managing director of the Planetary Society,

wanted me to give you a message that he just got apparently from NASA. NASA feels that the micro-rovers need to be bigger. What? Okay. But seriously, what are we talking about here? Why little tiny rovers? Well, micro-rovers are cool. No.

What we've looked at, this is, we're doing this project, the Planetary Society, in partnership with Cornell University. And we have some NASA funding through what they call their Steckler program, Ralph Steckler program, which looks at possible things you could use for human settlement, colonization, things like that. possible things you could use for human settlement, colonization, things like that. And what we're looking at is this niche that has never been filled, which is to look at small rovers, micro rovers we're calling them. And there's no precise definition, so we define them as roughly 1 to 10 or 12 kilograms. So think Muses C, if you ever saw the little rover designed for asteroid work, which never flew,

up to Sojourner, which is kind of the top end of the bracket. And so people have looked at small rovers. They flew Sojourner, but really nothing smaller. But where we're really looking that's different and cool is how could you use these low-cost, low-mass, low-volume micro-rovers to work with humans? So you go to the surface of the moon or even on an asteroid or the Mars. The Mars. It's just that important.

You would have these micro-rover assistants. This is my little robot friend. Yeah, exactly. They're your little robot friend, and you'd have a few of them because they are small and they are comparatively inexpensive. And you can send them out ahead of the astronauts to do reconnaissance. Basically, they help you by you increase the astronaut efficiency and keep them safer.

So they could do things like reconnaissance or facilities inspection. They help you plan out when you actually send astronauts outside the base or the spacecraft, you make sure they're really optimizing what they're doing. And you keep them small, partly, I would think, because when they turn on you, as robots inevitably will do, they really can't do much more than give you a hot foot or something. The problem is we have several of them, so it's kind of like the sci-fi movies with the small creatures that crawl all over your body.

The swarm. The swarm of micro-rovers. Don't worry. We are calling them Hal, though. That's probably a bad idea. That's not a good idea. Probably a bad idea. They'd have a little squeaky voice, though, instead of a really nice voice.

Dave! Dave! Don't let me tell you! There was no way we were going to be able to do this. This is a straight interview. I have so much important information. I know. Let's go on with that. Now, what can a little rover do that maybe a big one can't or maybe just do as well as a big one? Right.

You're not replacing big rovers for what they do. Uh, you're not replacing big rovers for what they do, uh, but there are things micro rovers can do more efficiently, especially when you take into the fact that the fact that they can be much less expensive, uh, you can have a few of them. So you don't have, they don't have to be as perfect. Basically they can be slightly expendable. They're riskier. Now that's never going to mean you're sending things you think are going to fail. But if you, if you have five and you lose one, it's not like losing a Mars science laboratory on Mars,

and there goes your couple billion dollars. So these are the guys I could send down into the canyon. Right, and that's exactly one of the things that when we had a team of people, and one of the things we looked at was really what uses could you make? What's different about these? And one of them is you can send them into a dangerous area and working we worked with astronaut tom jones and he liked this idea particularly of being able to send you could tether them so hopefully you can pull them back out but if they get stuck in the lava tube

well it's a bummer but it's not like getting an astronaut stuck in the lava tube but they also can can do other things they can serve as communication relays for over the hill. You can put a couple of them on the hill and then use them to relay communications to your astronauts who are out roaming around. They also have the advantage if you have lots of small things, because presumably if you have a larger rover, you're going to have one, maybe two. With several small things, you can actually explore an area faster. So you can send out a few of these micro rovers and do reconnaissance of an area faster than you could with a larger rover. Obviously, you have limitations on instrumentation,

but that's the kind of thing we're assuming there are humans that will follow up or big rovers that can go with the larger bunch of equipment. We also envision these things being easy to manipulate and even came up in the course of our study to make them modular. So you really can plug and play different instruments. You can put in different cameras, different spectrometers, and send them back out to do a different shot. So these would be field configurable? Is that a good way to put it? Exactly. That's a great way to look at it as opposed to most of the rovers we've sent where

you send it and that's the way it stays. Here you'd have a few different configurations. We also really like these, our long-term goal. Right now this has been phase one of the Steckler grant program. If we got all the phases, the three phases, plus our own planetary society research, this was supported by NASA and our membership, we would actually have a standardized micro rover chassis that you could drive around, would have the locomotion, the power solutions, the communication solutions.

But you could actually have groups propose different instruments to fly. And you could, we envision it very much along the lines of like a CubeSat model. Yeah, yeah, one size fits all. You have the standardized spacecraft, and it's great for places like universities because you can actually get students in, and you've got the core done, and you work on the add-ons that make it do neat stuff. More from Bruce Betts about the micro-rovers in our space exploration future when we return. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride.

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Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're spending a few extra minutes with Bruce Betts today. You know him as my partner in our What's Up segment, but that's not why the Planetary Society calls him its Director of Projects. One of his many projects is looking at the possible advantages and challenges

presented by small, mobile robots called micro-rovers. by small, mobile robots called micro-rovers. They are expected to someday work with humans to explore such locales as the Moon and Mars, so it's appropriate that an experienced astronaut has been part of the team. You mentioned Tom Jones. There are some other real cool people involved with this. There are. There's this Bruce Betts guy. Oh, yeah, well, but no, the really cool ones. Oh, I'm sorry. The really cool ones. Yeah, Jim Bell, who's president of the Planetary Society, but he's also been head of the camera teams on Mars Exploration Rovers

and running the operations of those ever since they got there. So great rover insight. We've had assistance from Brian Wilcox at JPL who designed the Muses CN rover. And we've got a bunch of people at Cornell, led by Mason Peck, a professor there. And there was a whole engineering class that their semester of spacecraft engineering had a focus on micro-rovers. And so about 50 students, undergrad and graduate students, did design reports looking at this. So we have a whole bunch of information that fills in. And we also have Doug Stetson, who has extensive spacecraft experience,

who's been involved with this, and a bunch of other people we've tapped to give kind of external looks at it. Doug Stetson, he's got some involvement with the LightSail project as well, doesn't he, I think? He's been a reviewer with the LightSail project and also helped planetary society in other ways. And then we also have the people who have been heavily involved with LightSail from Stellar Exploration, Tom Svitek and his collaborators there at Stellar. And if we move on to Phase 2, which will start building these cute little things,

they will be heavily involved in doing the design and build of a prototype that we can then test out. So where are we in this phase one, this design period? We are, to quote the formal goals of phase one, they were to do the scientific and technical merit and establish that, and we feel we have. These are really cool things. You can't use them for everything, but what they're good at, they're really good at. And then to determine the technical feasibility, we did that by looking at various design aspects and trade studies. So there's been a lot of paper studies. We really defined uses a lot because no one had really looked at, you know, is this useful? How can you use them? So we've got our list of uses. We've put it out there to the world, published it, etc.

And we also have one other piece I want to mention in case people want to go look at it on our website under projects. If you look under micro-rovers, you'll find the micro-rover catalog. So it's at planetary.org and check under projects. There's a drop-down for projects. Right. And we'll put a link up to that as well on the show page. That grew out of my frustration when we were first looking into this to figure out, well, what have other people done? We don't want to literally reinvent the wheel. And there's, so there's been very little, you know, there are very few

space rovers. People are familiar with them. And very few of this size, especially, but there've been a lot of, a lot of stuff on earth ranging from toys to in commercial applications to all sorts of military uses and some of those things you can't port over to the space world you've got thermal issues on the moon that you just don't have on earth but a lot of the things like locomotion and basic designs there there's a good basis so we said and now we have uh with the especially with the help of an intern for us pernell and our own am Amir Alexander, put together this online database. It's the one-stop shopping for 100 rovers.

And we had both the ones in our size category all the way up to 100 kilograms, basic information, what they do, and then links off to external sites to learn more. And pictures. We love pictures. This is the so-called catalog that you referred to before the interview. Micro-over catalog, so come check it out. Also on the website. Listen, I'll throw something at you just from left field. I saw this cool thing of robots working together,

and they actually sort of grabbed, bear with me here, a small child who knew what was going on and was lying on the floor and started to drag this child because they were working together as a team. They were essentially rovers. Is there some thought of these rovers communicating with each other? Okay, just to be clear, we are not working on kidnapping robots. Your children are safe from us. I don't know who's doing it, but it's not us.

Okay. Yes, there is. But that's kind of a next phase look at things. But it is possible to have these. And people have looked at the synergistic workings of groups of these micro-rovers. And that is one of the ways we envision them. But we also envision them, again, a lot of this is the simplicity and reliability of them. As one of the main modes for these will be to joystick them around.

And that can be if you're on the moon, you probably have mostly people on Earth driving them because you don't have much of a delay time. But you could have the astronauts do it. It's just less likely you want to take their time. But if astronauts want to joystick them around, they can. If you're on Mars, you may have astronauts in orbit around Mars or on Phobos that are joysticking them on the surface, or particularly if they're on an asteroid mission, which it's so hard to maneuver around, they can joystick them on the surface. They'll have autonomy. They'll have smarts. And people, including in the studies we've done, have been talking about this synergy. But I think their first-order contribution is partially in

their simplicity and ability to do the task at the time. But it's definitely something people have thought about. Very cool stuff. You've got so many notes in front of you here. I'm sure we haven't covered much of this, but we have this other very important segment that we need to get to called What's Up. Oh, I've heard great things about that. Yeah, well, stick around. I hadn't heard about the show, but I heard about that.

Stick around because we're about to record it right after a break. All right, I will. But thank you for taking us through this, and we hope people will go and take a look at the site, planetary.org, under projects. Look up micro-rovers, and you can learn more. Please do. Check it out. Thank you. He's Dr. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he also leads this effort to develop the itty-bitty rovers that may be in our space futures.

Stay tuned. We're just a few moments away from What's Up with Dr. Bruce Betts. Well, what a surprise. We're back with What's Up? And Dr. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. You should have heard this segment that we just did about micro-rovers. I think you'd have enjoyed it. Wow, that sounds interesting. What's up? Besides micro-rovers, up in the night sky,

you can check out Jupiter's still-dominating evening sky as a bright star-like object in the southeast after sunset. In the pre-dawn, we've got Venus, super bright, still pretty high up as Venus goes before dawn. You can look below it and see Scorpius's bright reddish, red giant star Antares. Antares, yes. And then to the lower left of that, you still may be able to pick up Mercury,

but it's awfully low. In this week in space history, Matt, five years ago, New Horizons launched on its long journey towards Pluto. Good Lord, and years yet to go. That's incredible. Off until 2015. Yeah, yeah. We'll have Alan Stern on the show again before too long.

At least before it gets there. Yes, right. Not after. And after. And this week, we've got Buzz Aldrin's 80th birthday. Hey, happy birthday, Buzz. That's gotten a lot of media play. That's a good thing to know.

It is indeed. Also, in 1978, the first automatic resupply ship docking. Progress won. That's significant. Yeah. Very cool achievement. And we move on. And am I doing it this week?

Yeah, I want you to do it this week. We got one more from Brandon Cook, but I think I'm going to save that segment for next week. Oh, I'm so excited. There's so much pressure. Yeah, just want to whet people's appetite. Random Space Fact! pressure yeah just want to whet people's appetite and then the soprano should come in and just no no no no thank you oh not me you don't have to play both parts all right okay you know i just was thinking about this for some reason the smallest rover that actually was sent to another

planetary surface sojourner at 11 and.5 kilograms with Mars Pathfinder in 1997. And you said that it was at the top end of your micro rover category, right? Exactly. Yeah, this cute little guy. Should we go on to our trivia contest? Yeah, let's do that. We challenged people. NASA had put out a call for technology, things that they could test either in the so-called vomit

comet, they probably didn't use that term, or on suborbital flights. And we asked people, hey, what would you send? What are your ideas to respond to this call? And we'd give brownie points, as always, for humor. How'd we do, Matt? I mean, I know how we did. I read it. You saw the entries.

Yes. You know what? This did not get our typical huge response when we challenge people this way. Because maybe it was just too tough for folks. But we did get some interesting responses. It was kind of offbeat. And not offbeat enough, I think, was the problem. Maybe that's it.

Maybe it wasn't quite far enough out there for our audience. But we did get some good ones. Thank you to all of you who entered, whether we have time to mention you or not, but we do really appreciate it. Yes. We got one which we can't even talk about in great detail, which is actually quite funny.

On public radio. Yeah, it has to do with Kim Kardashian in space, or at least part of her in space. And this came to us from Greg Liberace, but that's really as far as we can go with that. Thank you, Greg. Lindsay Dawson. Lindsay, who always sends us from Australia a treatise on something. He didn't really respond, so he recognized that his entry didn't really count.

But he has this wonderful proposal for the, what does he call it? Now I've lost it. Balloon-a-shoot? The balloon-a-shoot. Paraloon? Paraloon? Which is quite wonderful. But because it wouldn't actually fly as one of these NASA opportunities, we're not going to count it. We had several people who, this must really capture people's imaginations, who wanted to know how would a fish swim in microgravity, you know, if you put them in a sealed goldfish bowl or something. You know, I believe they've done that in space already. You know, I'm not surprised.

But it is a cool idea. It is. But here's our winner. Are you ready? Regular listener, Susan Noe, I think she enters the trivia contest almost every week. She said, what would be the technology that should be tested in microgravity by NASA? She said, the technology of Spider-Man the musical. Yeah, that was out there.

That one made me laugh. I was not ready for that as a recommendation. I don't think NASA's ready for that yet. I don't think so. I'm not even sure Broadway is. So, Susan, you won yourself a contest and a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Congratulations. Congratulations.

Shall we move on? What are we giving away this time? You know what? How about this? We can get another book from Mike Brown. We can get another copy of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. So why don't we give that away? Sorry for Pluto every time.

A signed copy of the book. By? By Mike. Oh, okay. Just checking. I can fire up my pen. I'm ready. Yeah.

When you write one, we'll, we'll give it away and you can sign it. So, uh, to, to try for that prize that we'll have Mike Brown signature. Ooh,

he killed the planet. Ooh, he's so cool. Answer the following question. How many times more massive is Jupiter than Earth? Okay. Massive. Yeah. Not volume. Not volume. Not diameter. Mass. Approximately.

Massive. How much more massive is Jupiter than Earth? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You have until Monday, January 24 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that entry. And good luck.

We're done. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up at the night sky and think about spherical objects. Thank you and good night. And let me just say that I had a ball doing this segment with you. Thank you for that joke. Bruce actually thought of that moments ago.

He's Bruce Betts. And shall I say it again? He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. I hope you'll join us next week for another conversation with planetary scientist and exobiologist Chris McKay. We'll talk about the new evidence for organic compounds on Mars, evidence that was actually gathered 35 years ago. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation.

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