Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Phoenix on Ice: One Week in the Martian Arctic Circle

Episode Date: June 2, 2008

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It sure looks like ice. More coverage of the Phoenix mission this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier and back to Mars. I'm Matt Kaplan. Another picture. Oh, there's a solar panel. Woo! There's another solar array. There's rocks in the background. That's planetary scientists Jim Bell and Bruce Betts at PlanetFest,

adding color commentary for the 750 Phoenix fans on Sunday, March 25. It was just an hour and a half after the successful landing. I see a couple of rocks and pebbles off in the background there, too. Oh, look at that! Ho, ho! Wait, come back! Come back!

That was polygons. That was polygons. That was polygonal terrain right there. Very nice. Flip pad. Yeah! that was polygonal terrain right there very nice foot pad yeah all right we continue our special coverage of the phoenix lander that has already started to dig into the martian permafrost we'll get an extended update from emily locked wall in a minute then you'll hear a sampling of the celebration at Planet Fest, as well as in the JPL press conference after those first pictures arrived

from the Arctic Circle on the Red Planet. And Bruce Betts will drop by for this week's edition of What's Up, including yet another Phoenix trivia question that could win you a priceless Planetary Radio t-shirt. Hey, how about those other explorers on the Martian surface?

You'll find a detailed update on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers at planetary.org. With all the hubbub on Mars, we hope you didn't miss the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery. STS-124 lifted off exactly as planned on May 31. It is carrying another big hunk of the Japanese Kaibo lab for the International Space Station. And speaking of priceless, how about thoseibo lab for the International Space Station. And speaking of priceless, how about those spare parts for the broken ISS toilet? That must be a relief. I don't think anyone has been following the Phoenix mission more closely than my colleague Emily Lakdawalla. Emily is the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator

and does our regular Q&A segment, but she's best known online as the author of the Society's blog at planetary.org. I got her on a Skype connection as we were finishing work on this episode so that we could hear the very latest about the three-legged lander. Emily, a very exciting week. Yes, it has been a very exciting week and a very busy one. What do you think are the highlights? I mean, I'm thinking of Holy Cow and a certain Snow Queen. Yeah, one word, ice. Phoenix went to Mars looking for ice. They landed in a spot that they had carefully selected to have a lot of evidence that there was probably ice lying just below the surface. They had more than one line of evidence indicating that it was there, but they didn't actually have a photo of ice sitting on the surface. So, you know, they could have gotten there and found out that their guess had

been wrong. And it turns out that their landing jets just happened to blast away the top few centimeters of soil and expose. They're not totally positive, but evidence strongly suggests that they are looking at ice on Mars. Yeah, when you first reported this, you were trying to be very careful about speculating yourself, but you said that the consensus now, without having actually dug into it, is that that's what we're looking at. That's right. And the way it was worded in today's phone briefing was, we have found no evidence to the contrary. Good scientists. Continue, you know, finding evidence that backs up the hypothesis that it's ice. But really, you know, until they get the robotic arm up close to this material, I don't think they're going to be absolutely conclusive about it.

Certainly. Looking at it, and you were careful to point out that this could have been contrast that was inaccurate because it was a raw image, but it sure looked like a patch of ice surrounded by a bunch of Martian dirt. It really does. You can tell it's unusually bright, not only because it looks white, but you can see a shadow of the landing leg falling across the ice, and the shadow is much brighter on the ice than it is on the soil, or I should say on the putative ice. You can also tell from its morphology. It's very flat.

It's tabular in shape. It seems to be fairly smooth. You can also tell from the way the shadows fall across the surface that this is stuff that is deeper than the surface. You can tell the landing jets excavated to some depth, a few centimeters into the soil. And so what you're seeing is something that is buried below the surface. The great things about this is that if it turns out to be ice, it's very strong evidence that wherever the robotic arm digs, they should find ice. So that's very good news. That is fantastic. And, of course, that's kind of what Peter Smith was telling us he thought was going to happen anyway.

That's true. And, you know, that was the most likely thing, given the multiple lines of evidence that they had suggesting that there was ice close to the surface. But, you know, it's always nice to be right. Of course. And it doesn't happen that often. We're talking here, I assume, mostly about the aptly named Holy Cow. There is also this other interesting little patch that's underneath the rover. The camera on the arm actually had to kind of reach underneath and had good practical reason for doing that. But that's the one you at first were calling the platey things?

The platey things, yes. There's two targets that are under consideration here. And both of these targets were not originally imaged in order to look for ice. The imaging was done in order to look at how the lander footpads were sitting on the surface to make sure that the lander was sitting stably. They could see one footpad from the mast-mounted camera. Then on Sol 4, they took an image of a second footpad, and that's the one that is near the site called Snow Queen, where you can see these sort of platey-looking materials, but

they don't look as bright compared to the dirt as Holy Cow does. They actually look kind of dirt-colored, but their morphology, their shape looks like it might possibly be ice. And then a couple of cells later, they got this look all the way underneath the lander at the far leg, the last leg, and that's where they saw Holy Cow. Snow Queen is actually closer to, it's easier to reach than Holy Cow. Holy Cow is all the way underneath the lander, and I don't think the robotic arm can actually touch that up close. I don't think it can reach into that geometry. But it can reach and touch Snow Queen. They haven't done it yet because one of the things they have to do during these first few sols of the mission is teach the arm where the ground is so that they don't run around and smack the arm into the ground when they're operating it. So it could not get close enough

to Snow Queen to actually reach out and touch it yet. But I'm sure they'll do that later. I did wonder if they could get it at Holy Cow because it was obviously directly underneath. You could see the thrusters sticking out from below Phoenix. That's right. You can see the thrusters. And one question that I think is on a lot of people's minds is could they use the Mars Descent Imager to take a picture of this target? the Mars descent imager to take a picture of this target. You may recall that the Mars descent imager or MARDI was a camera that was designed to take photos as Phoenix landed. They'd never turned it on because they discovered a very low probability of a conflict between MARDI and some of the other electronics that could possibly doom the landing. It was a very, very small chance,

but they decided that MARDI wasn't important enough to suffer this small chance for calamity. So Marty was never turned on, much to the chagrin of the scientists who built it, but there's nothing wrong with the instrument. And so it's a good question whether Marty could actually be used to take a picture of it. I've looked at an image on the Mail and Space Science System's website, a test image from Marty, and you might think that maybe a camera designed to take pictures of the surface of Mars many kilometers below you might not be in focus just a meter above the ground, but it turns out that they can get very good focus. So the last question remaining is, is Marty pointing in the direction of Holy Cow? Marty wasn't pointed directly down. It's

canted outboard at a slight angle. So I don't know whether Holy Cow is in Marty's field of view, but it would be very interesting if they got a chance to actually make some use of this instrument that otherwise hasn't been used. Imagine how appropriate that is, a phoenix-like rise from the ashes for an instrument on the spacecraft called Phoenix. That would be quite a rise from the ashes for Marty. And don't forget that Marty also has a microphone. There's no real scientific purpose to turning on that microphone. And it sounds like the engineering team has been kind of reluctant to consider turning on the microphone just for the chance to get sounds that may have no science or engineering purpose. But hey, if they might be able to turn it on for a good science reason to get an image of Holy Cow, then why not turn the

microphone on too? I'm with you on that. It would certainly be nice to hear that breeze blowing by that we can see up above on the weather instrumentation. I think that telltale is just so cool. And you know, it's really, it's so low tech. It's kind of like the sundial on the Mars rovers. I mean, who needs a sundial on the rovers? But actually, the telltale is very valuable. It shows you visually which direction the wind is blowing and how hard. Although one interesting thing about those images is that there seems to be a kink in the thread that holds the telltale. So it's always kinked out in one direction. I think that's going to make it a little bit harder for them to read the actual wind speed, but at least you can see

the direction. And that is so special, I think, to be able to see that. And I will refer people to your blog where all these images are and a lot of terrific animations, including the laser that's part of the LiDAR instrument, which I guess NASA got around to doing the same kind of animation after you did it. But you can actually see that laser firing off and telling us how much dust is in the sky above Phoenix. That's right. And, you know, I don't know, I'm not really sure why they're taking so many images of this laser, but it's awfully cool to see that thing flashing on and off on top of the lander. Now, sadly, not everything is working with absolute perfection.

There seems to be a problem, I guess, with this TIGA instrument, which is a fairly important one. Yeah, it's a very important one. It's the instrument, I think it stands for the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer. You got it. They plan on delivering samples of soil and ice to ovens inside this instrument that will heat up the samples and basically sniff the gases that come off the samples. Not only is it going to be doing a chemical analysis on those gases,

but just by figuring out at what temperature the gases come off tells you an awful lot about the composition and makeup of the soil. While they were characterizing the instrument, they discovered a short circuit inside the ion source. That's definitely a concern. And so right now the instrument is not operating normally. However, they are talking about having workarounds. And I understand they actually have a backup ion source. So even if that first ion source is broken, I think they have a backup that they should be able to use. So it actually doesn't sound quite as dire as the reports in the media have made it seem. Well, thank you. I really appreciate your clarifying that. Let's go back to that arm for a moment, because it has been getting

some activity. I mean, that's either a footprint or a little bit of scooped out Mars. That's right. They did yestersol, I guess you can say. They did their first touch of the digging scoop to the surface of Mars, and they left a little imprint of the scoop. One of the parts of the scoop has these four teeth on it, and when the four teeth made that imprint, it makes the whole print look an awful lot like a foot. And so they dubbed this spot Yeti, because it looks like the footprint of a snow creature walking across the Martian polar terrain. We could only wish, I guess. It's a brisk day up there on Mars, or at least it was yesterday. Looking forward to many more beautiful days of science before winter sets in up there within the Arctic Circle on Mars. What should we be looking for next? And I should mention again that we're speaking Sunday afternoon, Sunday, June 1st. Well, this coming week should

include the first digging activity. They did this first touch. They successfully touched the arm to the soil. And although I'm not entirely sure of the exact purpose of that test, basically, I think it's to figure out where the soil is in relation to the arm. So they've done that. The next thing they have to do is what's called a dig and dump. They're going to do their first attempt to dig into the soil with the scoop and then dump the soil elsewhere outside of the place where they dug. So that's just another test of a basic arm operation they're going to have to do repeatedly throughout the mission. If that goes well, then the next thing they will do is to actually attempt to acquire a sample of soil from close to the surface. And if that sample acquisition goes well, they'll take a photo of what's inside the scoop and see if they did a good job with that.

Then they can deliver it to that TIGA instrument on the following saw. And one thing that I just learned in the phone briefing today is that they will go ahead and deliver that sample to TIGA even if TIGA is not quite working yet. deliver that sample to TIGA, even if TIGA is not quite working yet, TIGA can hang on to the sample indefinitely while they work out the problems and then start doing the work with the oven and testing the evolved gases. Just sits in there as if it was in a piece of Tupperware, huh? That's right. Anything else that we've missed that you want to mention before we go? I don't think there's anything in specific. I'll just mention that like Cassini and the Mars Exploration Rovers, you can follow the Phoenix mission practically in real time by visiting their website and downloading the raw images. So it was in that way that I learned about this holy cow spot with ice.

I saw it before the Phoenix team had a chance to do a press release about it because I was there watching the images come down. So check for them. So check for them. They get delivered on a regular basis at about 4 or 5 p.m. Phoenix time, which, of course, differs from your time zone by some set amount. And then it changes every 40 minutes or changes 40 minutes per day as the Martian days are a little longer than the Earth days. But you can download some neat Google gadgets that lets you see what time it is at the Phoenix landing site. So you know what time to check for those new images coming down. And if you want to be a little bit lazier than that, you can do what I do, and that is follow what I think is the absolute best coverage of this mission. And that is in Emily's blog, which you'll always find at planetary.org.

Thank you very much for that, Matt. I've been working very hard to cover Phoenix, and I'll continue doing that as Phoenix continues its mission on Mars. All right, Emily, we'll look forward to talking to you again, hopefully next week, when we'll have even more science back from Phoenix. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society, and she is usually, sometimes there's a guest in there, but she's almost always the author of the weblog, the blog at planetary.org. We're going to take a quick break, then back to special coverage of the Phoenix mission to Mars. 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. Here is Phoenix Mission Principal Investigator Peter Smith shortly after the first pictures arrived from his lander on Mars. Well, after that awesome landing,

and I had to wait for an entire hour and a half for that Odyssey spacecraft to come around overhead again to see if we had any pictures. And by God, I've been getting some pressure from some of the members in the press that if I didn't get pictures down here, there was going to be a riot. So I won't mention any names,

but the Irish press was particularly... Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith. We should explain, one Irish TV reporter was particularly anxious to get those pictures from the Martian Arctic Circle. And who could blame him? Even NASA Administrator Michael Griffin couldn't wait to see the work of the Phoenix cameras, to say nothing of making a safe landing. In a surprise appearance,

Dr. Griffin showed up on the PlanetFest stage in Pasadena, California, where 750 like-minded fans were also waiting for the May 25 landing. Everybody who knows anything about it has helped scrub the Phoenix landing for later this afternoon. We think it's in good shape. We think it's going to succeed. But we do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard. So wish us luck

and let's hope our lives don't get more complicated. Thank you. applause it more complicated. Thank you. Applause Applause Applause Applause Thank you, Mike. Very glad you could come down here, very honored that you could come down

here, and even more so, I think it's very remarkable that a NASA administrator comes to the landing when the outcome is not known, because there are very many people in Washington who are more risk-averse than he is who would have said stay home or go golfing or do something else this weekend. But I can't resist. Lou, nearly everybody is more risk-averse than I am.

That's true. I have numerous surgeries to prove that I can't ski as well as my wife. All right. That was Lou Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, playing host to NASA administrator Mike Griffin. Also at PlanetFest, and providing welcome relief from the tension, was our friend Bill Nye, the science guy, who is vice president of the Planetary Society. Bill took questions and helped

pass the time as we waited for those spectacular first images. Well, what concerns me, you know, and I hope you're also thinking about this, 420 million, this lander is sitting on Mars. It's not even locked. million. This lander is sitting on Mars. It's not even locked. Okay. Somebody could walk up to it, you know, fool with the knobs. Yeah. People, yeah. Take the camera off the seat. Yeah. Windows are rolled down. Question. Could you address the mission longevity? I presume that it's landed

with the Arctic summer in full bloom. Full bloom. Yes. The Martian flowers are everywhere. But what if they are? What if they're under the ice? What if there's some Martian lichen or something? Ooh, that makes me crazy.

Or if you will, crazier. Yes. Say again, Jim. The question, longevity. How long will they last? Three months. Three Martian months. Sorry.

And then you heard Pete Smith right away going, what if it's an extended mission? Which is JPL talk for what if it doesn't break? You know, it may not break. And that's right. And so, you know, Spirit and Opportunity, my friends, you know, we're supposed to go three months. There's four years.

They're still driving around. It's cool, yeah, scraping one wheel in the snow. You see how wishful I am in the sand? I'm losing my mind. Bill Nye, the science guy at PlanetFest in Pasadena, will end our special coverage of the Phoenix mission with commentary from a couple of other admirers. You'll hear NASA Associate Administrator Ed Weiler first,

then Jet Propulsion Lab Director Charles Elachi adds an important footnote to Dr. Weiler's clever metaphor for just how accurate the Phoenix landing was. I'll admit they made it look easy, but let me remind you the math. Before tonight, 55 percent of all landing attempts on Mars have failed. After tonight, 50 percent have failed. If you consider that routine, that's your choice. Now, it did look routine because, as Mike said, you had an incredible team working incredible feats. I did give some thought to this 440,660,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

One part of 10,000,000,000,000,000. If I did my math right, and I apologize to those reporters, I told you it was a termite in Australia. It's actually the following. Doing something to that accuracy, and Mike will appreciate this as a golfer, it's like trying to hit a hole-in-one, but you tee off in Washington, and you hit the ball 10,000 miles, and you score a hole-in-one in Sydney, Australia.

That's one part in 10 million. Four-inch hole. That's not a bad shot. So, Charles, not a bad shot. You have to remember that hole is moving. And to Mike, Mike would appreciate it. Not to say that Australia is moving, it's just Mars is moving.

With that thought in mind, maybe it is more like hitting a termite, no sir. No, I think, I'm sure you know that throughout history, exploration always required courageous people and people who have superhuman dedication. And it's courageous people who undertook the exploration tonight and got Phoenix on the surface of Mars. Many people thought that this will not be possible, that we will not be able to succeed. All of us knew this is a very risky mission. succeed. All of us knew this is a very risky mission, but tonight this team made history, and they will be remembered forever that they are the first people who explored the polar region of Mars, and there is no telling what discoveries we'll be seeing over the next 90 days. As Ed said, it's a team which brought the best or some of the best from all of NASA.

Every center of NASA participated in this endeavor, be it in the launch or some of the best from all of NASA. Every center of NASA participated in this endeavor, be it in the launch or be it in the heat shield or being in the trajectory. So it really was a NASA team effort, both the human program and the robotic program worked together. We had some of the best from academia, as exemplified by the University of Arizona and Peter, and the best of industry, as exemplified by Lockheed Martin. So one thing I want to ask you, next time it's clear and you go outside and you look at Mars, just think that our nation has three stations on that planet, Spirit, Opportunity, and the Order of the Phoenix,

just to make the Harry Potter people feel good. Ed Weiler and Charles Elachi at the press conference following transmission of the first images from the Phoenix Mars lander. Bruce Betts is right around the corner as Planetary Radio continues. We'll finish up today's special coverage of the Phoenix mission with the guy who hosted the Planet Fest celebration about a week ago in Pasadena.

Dr. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's here for What's Up. Hey, been a fun week. It has been. All sorts of cool stuff going on with Phoenix and great pictures coming down. And including that Planetary Society DVD we'll talk about towards the end of the show. Hey, can we see Mars? You can. You can see Mars if you go out in the early evening or early to mid-evening.

Check it out in the west, up fairly high. It is approaching Saturn over the next few weeks in the night sky, not out in deep space. And so you will see it as orangish-reddish getting farther from Castor and Pollux and headed towards Leo, where Saturn's hanging out still very, very close to Leo's brightest star, Regulus. Saturn is the somewhat brighter of the two and kind of yellowish looking. So they'll have a conjunction and get closer in a few weeks, get very close in a few weeks. And then in the pre-dawn sky, you can also check out Jupiter. In fact, if you're up late at night, you can check it out rising in the east somewhere in the midnight type area.

And then it's high overhead in the pre-dawn. Can't miss it. Brightest star-like object up there is actually Jupiter. And that's our sky planet, Roundup. Roundup. Get along, little doggie. Let us go on. In fact, let's go straight to Random Space Fact. All Phoenix, all the time.

You actually, I'm sure, know this, Matt. The top of the permanent north polar cap of Mars, the one that Phoenix is set off from, is water ice on top, but we think it's CO2 ice underneath. And then there's water ice, of course, thought to be in the ground all around the cap, all the way down to where Phoenix is, hence the reason it landed there. But the permanent southern cap is actually carbon dioxide ice on the surface of it due to a higher altitude and colder temperatures. In both cases, you have seasonal carbon dioxide caps that grow and get very large. And in fact, that eventually, that CO2 cap, when we hit Martian winter, will form over the Phoenix lander. Good thing Phoenix didn't get confused and go south. It wouldn't have been nearly as interesting, would it?

Well, it might have. I skipped the part. You also have water ice surround in the permafrost type stuff under the upper level of dirt, so to speak, in both poles. Maybe next time. The original lander, I believe, was scheduled to go to the south, but orbital things said go north. Go north, young lander.

Let's stick with the Phoenix theme and move on to the trivia contest. All right, in the trivia contest, we asked you, what does it say, what do we tell astronauts that we hope find the Planetary Society's Phoenix DVD sometime in the future? We say attention, astronauts, and what do we tell them to do? How do we do, Matt? Hey, here's the winner. I'm just going to lay it on you right now.

He's a past winner, but it's been a long time. Timo Reiger. Timo Reiger, not to be confused with Timo Ray Gunn, I guess, but Timo out of Seattle, Washington, he said the DVD on the Phoenix Lander put there by the Planetary Society says, attention, astronauts, take this with you. And then Timo adds, oh, and next DVD, don't forget to add, don't panic in large friendly letters.

Okay, we'll think about that. And take a towel. Anyway, Timo, you're going to get not a towel, but a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Keep alluding to it, but we're very excited. We have, of course, this Phoenix DVD with a quarter million names, people who wanted to send their names to Mars. It's got visions of Mars content with all sorts of science fiction and science fact and all sorts of good stuff.

You can find out more at planetary.org slash phoenixdvd and learn what all we do have on there and also see the latest images and in fact i just have seen they now have not only the original one with it sitting there on the deck of the lander but now there's one that even has the robotic scoop at the end of the robotic arm you can see in the background of the dvd just enough time to lay another trivia question on us all right i'm laying this one on you. Let's go back in Mars exploration history. Of course, Phoenix up towards the pole, 68 degrees north latitude. What was the highest latitude successful lander before Phoenix? Highest latitude successful lander before Phoenix. Go to

planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to get us your entry. Compete for Planetary Radio t-shirt. Get it to us by 2 p.m. Monday, June 9. That's 2 p.m. Pacific time. And we'll put you in the running. How's that? Sounds like a good plan. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about bricks and mortar and what creative things you can do with them. Thank you and good night. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Thank you, and good night. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. We hope you've enjoyed our special Phoenix coverage.

Back to our regular format next time. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.