Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Phoenix Mars Lander Update: Taste the Water!

Episode Date: August 4, 2008

An exciting update from the Phoenix Mars Lander team, with further insights from Emily Lakdawalla. Bill Nye also celebrates Phoenix.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Phoenix discovers water on Mars again, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. The Phoenix rose again last week, as we learned, in a press conference full of very good news from the mission and for the mission. We'll hear excerpts of that briefing on today's show, after which we'll check in with our own Emily Lakdawalla for her insights and analysis. I'll also ask Emily about mysterious speculation regarding possible results

from the lander's Mika instrument that have not yet been made public. Bill Nye the Science Guy will be along shortly. He's also trumpeting the success of the Phoenix lander, but he sees a necessary balance between robotic and human missions into the cosmos. the cosmos. And as always, Bruce Betts will drop by with another scan of the night sky, along with his patented random space fact and the latest winner of our space trivia contest. You can almost forget that Phoenix is not alone on the surface of Mars. Kidding, just kidding. Don't tell Steve Squires I said that. His two rovers are trucking right along. Opportunity had a scare recently when engineers saw a current spike in the left front wheel. It was just this kind of spike that preceded the loss of the motor in Spirit's right front wheel.

Fortunately, in this case, it seems to have been a one-time anomaly. Opportunity is now beginning to climb her way out of Big Victoria Crater on the Meridiani Plains. On the other side of the Red Planet, Spirit could really use a dusting. It's covered by a coat of the stuff. It has somehow managed to maintain power levels that have even allowed it to do some science at Gusev Crater. And now the sun is climbing higher in the sky once again. There's much more to read about the rovers

in the latest extensive report at planetary.org, which is also where you can get an update on the Planetary Society's life experiment. It will soon be headed for Mars-Moon Phobos on a Russian probe. I'll be right back with our special Phoenix coverage. Here's Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy, Vice President of the Planetary Society here. And this week, I remind you, we found water on Mars. Our robot lander, the Phoenix, put some Martian soil in its chemical detector and didn't find evidence of water, not evidence of an ancient lake,

not evidence of the salts that might have been in an ancient sea, not the concretions, the little blueberries, so-called, that prove that there was once water. No, this is water analyzed with chemistry on Mars. Now, we did all this, my friends, with a robot that cost us about $460 million, spent over at least the last 10 years, maybe the last 15 years, depending how you measure. So $46 million a year to the United States government is not very much money. To taxpayers, it's considerably less than a cup of coffee at a fancy coffee shop. It's so cheap, it's hard to

imagine. To send people there would cost us 40 or 50 or 100 times as much money. So these discoveries could change our world forever, and we did it for the background noise of the U.S. government budget. Now, with that said, many, many people that you meet will not consider this discovery that significant because all I can figure, my fellow planetary explorers, they don't quite grasp the significance of it. But if there were a person involved, a human wandering around on Mars, he or she would be a hero or a heroine to us here on Earth, and we would follow his and her adventures very closely. It is said that to make discoveries with a robot on Mars takes about a Martian day, about a sol.

To do it with a human takes about a minute. Maybe one of us listening will be that human someday, and he or she will change the world. Well, thanks for listening, everyone. I'm Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy, and you've been listening to Planetary Radio. Phoenix Lander has been toiling away for 65 sols, and for its effort, it has tasted success. And when Michael Myers says tasted, he means it. Myers is NASA's chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Program. He got things rolling at a University of Arizona media briefing that presented the latest exciting results from the Phoenix Mars lander, toiling away above the Arctic Circle on the red planet.

The probe is generally in great shape, and its solar panels are still generating plenty of power. So with that, what we'd like to do is announce that we're going to extend the mission to go to the end of the fiscal year, which brings it to like SAL 124. The mission is already met, the minimum mission success, and we're pretty close to completing full mission success. Next up at the briefing was Peter Smith. The Phoenix principal investigator left the latest announcement regarding water to Bill Boynton, who we will hear from in a minute. But there was no shortage of other data for Peter to talk about.

You may remember from before the May 25 landing that there were concerns expressed about the contamination that might be caused by the thrusters that lowered the lander to the surface. It turns out those thrusters did the scientists a major favor. We were very pleased to see that we landed right on top of water ice and the thrusters spread the soil away and revealed ice right underneath our lander. This was unexpected. And this was a wonderful thing for us because the water could have been all around us

and not within reach of our robotic arm. We had no way of knowing on the local scale how the ice was distributed. us because the water could have been all around us and not within reach of our robotic arm. We had no way of knowing on the local scale how the ice was distributed. So this has been a wonderful thing for us to be able to dig a trench, the Dodo Goldilocks Trench, and find at two inches deep that there's a solid layer and then to scrape pieces of this white solid layer off and watch them sublimate over the course of four days. So that was our first indication that this hard material is definitely ice. Look at this.

We now see a dark patch after scraping, and that dark patch we consider to be ice. And it changes its properties day by day. It goes kind of bluish, and then it goes whitish, and then it turns reddish. It's quite an amazing process as this ice sublimates away into the atmosphere. In other words, it goes from solid to vapor without being liquid. The scientific community and journalists are clamoring with somewhat understandable impatience for more results. But the Phoenix team is moving carefully and deliberately.

They couldn't be happier about the extension of the mission, something we'll talk with Emily Lakdawalla about after the break. Peter Smith made this request. I ask for a little patience here as we get to the part of the mission where we do the scientific analysis of the soil in contact with ice. This does take some time, and we still have not collected all our data, so it's definitely going to take some time. And we are looking to understand the history of the ice by trying to figure out if this ice has ever melted and through melting has created a liquid environment that modifies soils changes

chemistry changes the microscopic appearance of these soils and we're just getting the data back in the last week or two, and even, as you'll find out, very recently, yesterday. Through this analysis, we also hope to be able to answer a question that goes beyond just finding water ice, but is this a habitable zone on Mars? A habitable zone meaning that we have periodic liquid water, not today but over time, and we have the materials that are the basic ingredients for life forms. It'll be for a future mission to find if anybody's home in this environment, but we'll be finding if this is a place that needs to be searched for life forms throughout the next two months of our approved

mission. Peter Smith, Phoenix Principal Investigator. It fell to Bill Boynton to announce the results that have gotten the most media attention in the last few days. Bill is the lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or TIGA, instrument. That's the one with the tiny ovens designed to cook out interesting components of the soil and send them to a mass spectrometer. Well, I'm very happy to announce that we've gotten an ice sample into the Tega oven. When we first found this out yesterday, we were really pleased. There were champagne corks popping in the downlink room, and we just had a great time of it. It's something we've been waiting

quite a while for. That particular scoop of soil wasn't expected to have any ice in it. Bill Boynton said it was a happy surprise when Tiga determined that there was water ice in there after all. Not much, but definitely detectable. Boynton then reached under the briefing room table and pulled out a hat that would have been right at home on the head of a wicked, green-skinned sorceress. If you'll excuse me, I have to put on the appropriate regalia for this moment. I hope my daughter's not watching. So it turned out that probably it would have made more sense, rather than naming this after the witch in Hansel and Gretel, to name it after the wicked witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.

And the reason for that is, some of you may know, when she came to her final demise, she said to Dorothy, You cursed brat. Look what you have done. I'm melting. Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the TIGA instrument on the Phoenix lander. One could easily be led by some popular reports to think that this discovery of water is all Phoenix is up to. Not so.

First of all, we've pretty much known about the water at least since Percival Lowell's days, but all of the lander's instruments are doing amazing work. Peter Smith mentioned during the briefing that they will soon begin using the Atomic Force Microscope. It will provide 40 times higher magnification than we've seen so far, and the lander can boast of the most sophisticated weather instruments ever put on the Martian surface. By the way, you can see this Sol's high and low temperatures on the Phoenix homepage.

We'll have a link at planetary.org. Victoria Hipkin of the Canadian Space Agency is mission scientist for the Phoenix Meteorological Station. She presented data and images of everything from the cute little telltale that swings to and fro in the Martian wind, to the light detection and ranging, or LIDAR, instrument. The green laser beam shooting straight up from the LIDAR generated one of the best picture shows of the briefing. So this is absolutely an amazing image. What we're looking at here is essentially a laser light show on Mars

taken with an instrument with the power of a 30-watt light bulb. And we are seeing that from 200 million miles away. You know, this is absolutely astounding. Now, you know, as well as being a very, very cool image, this is also kind of a regular image in our atmospheric science data set in terms of what we're looking at. We're looking upwards. We've got the LiDAR beam in front.

It's the first time we've ever done that. But behind it, we can see essentially a movement of the dust in the sky moving past the beam. This is at some kilometers further back. We're able to see the first 1.5 kilometers of the LiDAR beam as we're looking up in the steep angle, but we're able to see the background sky and from the motions that we can see there, we can estimate wind direction at height, which is an important measurement for us. What we're also able to do with the combined LiDAR beam and the SSI image here is where the pixels overlap with the LiDAR beam, we can actually extract useful information from the SSI image here is where the pixels overlap with the LiDAR beam, we can actually extract useful information from the SSI image

that will help us with the composition of the particles, things like that. That was Victoria Hipkin of the Canadian Space Agency, now a weather person for the northern Martian highlands. Our last taste of the July 31 Phoenix Lander press conference comes from Mark Lemon of Texas A&M University. Mark is lead scientist for the Phoenix Surface Stereo Imager, or SSI. This camera has already completed a spectacular panorama of the landing site. The montage was stitched together from 400 individual snapshots,

taken at about 100 different angles. Sounds impressive, and it is. But it's nothing compared to the next panoramic effort planned for the SSI. This new montage has already been given a name that is in keeping with the mission fairy tale theme. It's the happily ever after pan. It's the panorama that we'll sort of go out in style with. The first panorama we took was the minimum mission success panorama. We finished on Sol 3.

The full one that I just showed is 100 times more data volume. The one that we are just starting in is 1,500 images taken through all geology filters at high quality, and altogether it will be two-thirds of a gigabyte of data to transmit from Mars to Earth, which is nearly 100 orbiter passes. So this is the sort of thing where we'll take one very small section of it at a time and just add it up over as long as we can keep on taking this panorama.

Mark Lemon, lead scientist for the Surface Stereo Imager. When we return, we'll talk with the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla about the latest news from the Phoenix lander and what we can look forward to as the mission continues. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society

to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio,

or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 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.

Emily Lakdawalla is Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society. Planetary geology is her number one field. That's just one reason she has been closely following the Phoenix lander. You can see her regular reports in the Society blog at planetary.org. Of course, you can usually hear her exploring every facet of solar system exploration in our Q&A segment. I asked Emily to provide additional insight into the news from the press conference at the University of Arizona, science headquarters for the mission. You'll also hear what she has heard regarding reports of so far unannounced data from the lander's MICA, or Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity

Analyzer. Emily, we just heard those excerpts from the media briefing. I'm going to start with really that very first comment from Michael Meyer, chief scientist of the Mars Exploration Program, saying that Phoenix has a new lease on life, or at least a small extension. Can this spacecraft survive for another, what is it, a month or so? Yeah, the mission extension is through the end of the fiscal year, which obviously has nothing to do with the health of the spacecraft. The spacecraft has excellent power. The power situation is actually so good that they should be able to continue using the robotic arm right through the nominal mission and probably two months past the end of the nominal mission. So they're probably going to blast right on by that September 30th mission extension going on up at least until mid-November. And what happens in

mid-November is that Mars goes into solar conjunction, and it gets very difficult to communicate with Mars spacecraft from Earth. So we're going to have to wait and see what happens after November 13th is the date that that happens. But I don't see any reason why the mission won't keep going, at least until that date. I wonder if we're going to get a chance to actually see this landing site become what Vicki Hipkin, the Phoenix Meteorological Mission scientist, she said it's going to be a winter wonderland. Yes, I think so. And, you know, I think that the mission team always hoped that they would begin to see signs of winter arriving to the landing site. And those are going to be, you know, nighttime frost forming on cold surfaces.

I think that we'll see a little bit of frost here and there. And if we're really lucky, we'll see that winter wonderland before Mars goes into the sun on November 13th. And then, you know, I think we all hope that we'll be able to continue communicating with Phoenix after it gets out of solar conjunction. But I don't know if they're going to keep funding it after that. Well, let's hope so. Speaking of Vicki Hipkin, that was a wonderful weather report she gave on the Martian Northern Highlands, and that video of the LIDAR experiment was pretty spectacular. Yeah, that was pretty amazing. The video that they showed, the LIDAR, you actually can see one and a half kilometers of it going up into the atmosphere, and you see dust blowing by. It's really an incredible movie. You know, it's funny, the meteorology is kind of a boring topic on Earth

unless it's, you know, extreme weather. But on Mars, it's what's happening. It's what changes from day to day or even from minute to minute at the landing site. So it suddenly becomes this very exciting topic. Let's turn to what has been, of course, the biggest story that came out last week, and that is about the water, which if you listen to our friends in the mainstream media, the story might be a little bit different from what was being communicated in the briefing. Yeah, well, it's about the 20th time that water has been discovered on Mars, which is, yeah, you know, they keep on announcing the discovery of water. It's not really what happened. We know that Mars has water in it. You can actually see the water on Mars with your backyard telescope. You can see the polar caps. But this really is a significant first. This week was the very stuff that's dissolved in it with instruments on board the spacecraft. And that never has been done before. And I suppose if you're really a skeptic, you could always have said that that white stuff was something else. That, you know, it looks like water.

It tastes like water. Well, now we know that it does taste like water. And so we know that it is, in fact, water on Mars. And as I think Peter Smith said, it's the stuff in the water. Well, now we know that it does taste like water. And so we know that it is, in fact, water on Mars. And as I think Peter Smith said, it's the stuff in the water you just referred to, the stuff that's dissolved in it. I mean, in fact, I said to Sean Solomon the other day, a very different mission, hey, it's dirty water we're looking for, right? It's true. It's dirty water we're looking for. We're looking for what's dissolved in it. We're looking for interesting things like perhaps organic compounds would be very interesting. But the other thing that we're looking at is something called the D to H ratio. You might

hear a scientist talking about that. And that's the deuterium to hydrogen ratio. It's how much hydrogen has one proton and one neutron instead of the more normal, just one proton hydrogen. And that can tell you a lot about how much atmosphere Mars once had and how much of it has been lost to space. Yeah, and I guess if there's enough deuterium, the settlers will someday be able to build fusion reactors. But no, don't even react to that. Listen, let me ask you about one more thing as we're running short of time.

There was a very sort of cryptic and even mysterious question from one of the reporters about MECA results, which Peter Smith might have even been slightly disturbed by, got the feeling that maybe there was something he wasn't quite ready to talk about. Yeah, that was Craig Kuvalt from Aviation Week in Space Technology. The question clearly indicated that Craig knew something that they weren't talking about on the press conference. I have also heard vague rumors that the MECA team has seen something kind of exciting, but clearly they are not ready to talk about it in the press. They may, for instance, have an indication of some very interesting chemical component in the water,

but it might just be one test result. And the more amazing it is, the more careful they're going to be about announcing it, the more extra tests they're going to want to do, the more they might want to see a confirmation from TIGA. I have no idea what they're talking about. I have no idea if it's something that's exciting only to Mars scientists or if it's something that truly would be exciting to the general public. We'll just have to wait and see and be patient with the team. I don't want to see any premature announcement that they're going to have to rescind later. With just a couple of seconds left, what are you looking forward to next from Mars?

I'm just looking forward to really getting going with a lot more sample acquisitions for all the instruments, the WETCAM lab, the optical microscope, and TIGA. They got really slowed down with trying to get that ice sample. Now that they have a tiny bit of ice and they're not concerned about the shortened Tiga anymore, they're going to really go great guns to get lots more samples into their instruments as quickly as they can while the power is good. Emily, as always, great talking with you. Thanks for the great work. You're quite welcome.

Emily Lakdawalla is the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society. You hear her here most weeks doing our Q&A segment, but now and then a special report like this one on the Phoenix mission. So no Q&A today. That means I'll be back in just a couple of seconds with Bruce Bet Betts, for another round of What's Up via Skype. And I'm happy to be talking at you. And I'm happy to be talking at you as well, Matt. How are you today?

I'm great. I'm excited. We've had all this great coverage of Phoenix, and we're going to continue that in the future. We're going to be able to do it for at least a month longer than we thought we would, maybe longer than that. It's really fun. It's true. It's good stuff happening up there, and they're moving a lot of dirt around and playing with some ice. It's good. Tell us some more good stuff up there. Jupiter. Jupiter's the pretty thing in the sky right at the moment, and you can see it easily as the brightest star-like object in the sky over in the east after sunset. Can't miss it. If you check it out with

a small telescope or some binoculars, you can look for the little dots next to it that are the big moons of Jupiter. And that's really the focus in terms of the planets right now. But we've also got for much of the world, but not us, a lunar eclipse on August 16th, and there's a partial lunar eclipse visible from pretty much every continent but North America. And you can check out a link from our website to NASA's eclipse page to get some more information on that. We also have the Perseid meteor shower visible to everyone, peaking on August 12th, but visible with increased meteor activity a few days before and a few days after.

And that one's simple. You go out and you stare up at the sky and relax. It's usually better after midnight and when the moon's out of the way, which will be before dawn. But any time of night, you can check out the brighter ones. If you're at a dark site, you actually can see perhaps 60 per hour. It's a good meteor shower, August 12th, the peak on that. Fun thing to do. Let us move on. On to random space fact!

Jupiter. I'm into Jupiter today because it's bright and it's easy to see, and if you have that small telescope, you can also, or a big one, check out those dark and light bands running across Jupiter, parallel to the equator. And so you'll be able to impress your friends. You'll know to call the dark ones fish and the bright ones zones. What?

I was just seeing if you were paying attention. I'm here. I'm not asleep. Okay. Still, I would call the dark ones fish, but you can also call them belts. That actually would probably be more appropriate in the science community. Belts being the dark ones and zones being the white ones. And my theory is if they ever have ones that are perpendicular to the equator, they will call them suspenders.

Go fish. On to the trivia contest. We asked you, how long was Apollo 17 on the surface of the moon? Were the astronauts with Apollo 17, how long were they on the surface of the moon, the last lunar mission with humans? How did we do, Matt? Hey, lots of entries, and our winner is Jan Knopf. Jan Knopf of Dossenheim, Germany, near Heidelberg, where he apparently works for the Physics Institute at the University of Heidelberg, a place with a pretty amazing history in the discoveries in physics in the 20th century. He said that Apollo 17 was actually on the surface

of the moon, and this is what everybody came up with, three days, two hours, 59 minutes, and 40 seconds. And Apollo 17, that was the Challenger lander, the Challenger lunar module, I should say. And who was aboard? Dr. Betts? It was Bob and John. No, it was Harrison Schmidt and Gene Cernan. You're absolutely right. Pay that man $100. Yes! We're going to give Jan Knoff, though. He said, I take the biggest size of the poster, because the website still asks people for their size, even though it says they're going to get an Explorer's Guide to Mars poster. We'll send him the mural size.

Yeah. Plus he'd rather have the tapestry. Actually, one size fits all. So that's what he's going to get, I think. Here's the trivia contest for next time around. What was the first successful balloon mission in the atmosphere of Venus? First successful balloon mission. Atmosphere of Venus. First successful balloon mission atmosphere of Venus. Go to planetary.org slash radio.

Find out how to enter and compete for another fabulous Explorer's Guide to Mars poster with a beautiful map, pictures, information. It'll be fabulous. You've got until 2 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, August 11, to get that entry to us. You know what? I've got Perseids on the mind because I'm going to be out of town, very short vacation, won't interrupt the show. But on the 12th, I'm going to be someplace much, much darker than Southern California. I will be up the Central California coast, and I will have to give you a report.

I guess it will be two shows from now on whether I got to see some of those little bits of stuff flying into our atmosphere. Please do. If you don't have those pesky clouds and fog, you should be fine. Yeah, that's what I'm a little worried about on the coast up there. It's usually pretty overcast, but I'm really looking forward to it and looking forward to getting away for a few days as well. And looking forward to seeing you in person next time. Well, sure. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, think of the miracle of dust. Lots and lots of dust, some of it falling into the atmosphere, some of it falling on your coffee table. Thank you and good night. Some of it coming from Mars, maybe. Anyway, he's

Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Thanks very much for listening. We'll be back next time with more from around our solar system and beyond. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.