Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live Celebrates the Launch of MAVEN

Episode Date: November 18, 2013

The successful launch of MAVEN was covered by Mat Kaplan, Bruce Betts and Emily Lakdawalla, with special, launch site reports from Jim Bell and Bill Nye.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

MAVEN LAUNCHES FOR MARS ON PLANETARY RADIO LIVE Welcome to a special edition of the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The next mission to the Red Planet is on its way. You'll hear portions of our special live coverage, including Emily Lakdawalla and Bruce Betts, along with Jim Bell and Bill Nye reporting from the Florida launch site. We'll forego Emily and Bill's regular segments, but there is news to share. On Friday, November 15th, NASA canceled development of the Advanced Sterling Radioisotope

Generator, or ASRG. Casey Dreyer is the Planetary Society's advocacy and outreach strategist. I found him at his computer just minutes after the announcement. Casey, when I was up at the office yesterday, I got the impression that you were quite surprised by this very disturbing development. Yeah, that's true. No one really saw it coming. Of course, it came out on a Friday afternoon, your classic bad news data dump time. It was unexpected, but again, kind of one of those things in retrospect where it makes sense considering the financial pressures that NASA, and particularly planetary science, is facing. So here we were just a few weeks ago on this program, talking at somewhat greater length about why these developments, not just the creation of plutonium, but the development

of this advanced device, are so important. What is the big deal here? I mean, we are producing plutonium again. Why does it matter that we've canceled the ASRG? Well, yes, and we are producing plutonium again. And so that's no matter what people take out of this, we are still making plutonium. That's really important. And fundamentally, that's the most important.

And that's reflected in their decisions the other day. The idea was you want to make the transfer of the heat coming off the plutonium from its decay into electricity. You want to make that more efficient. So you don't have to use as much plutonium to provide the same amount of electricity. This helps extend the life of the current stocks and it would reduce the amount of pressure on the supply. You don't have to make as much as fast in order to keep missions flying. So the ASRG uses this kind of interesting moving internal part. It's a Stirling engine for all you engineers out there. You can look it up, and it's basically this little piston or pump

that moves around inside and generates an electric field. The efficiency gains from this concept are about four times that of the regular radioisotope thermal electric generator, which every other spacecraft has ever used, like Curiosity. That just uses thermocouples to transfer the heat into electricity. So it's very dependable. There's no moving parts, but it's relatively inefficient. The ASRGs were addressing that problem and giving you that kind of efficiency gain using less plutonium, but proved to be a very daunting engineering challenge for NASA. Do you get the impression that this was canceled purely for budget reasons,

or was it partly those technological challenges? The only reasons that they've stated publicly, and that's the only reasons I know, are due to budget. And, you know, just because something is difficult technologically doesn't mean the program is not going to work. Aren't we supposed to do things because they're hard? Someone said that once. Yes, not because they're easy.

That's true. That's one of the things. And it had been behind its schedule. They were prepping to do a mock mission earlier this year to kind of run one of these things for a long time in a mission environment, so in a vacuum, and to just put it through its paces on Earth to work out the last kinks. And as late as this summer, NASA had been saying that we'll have two flight-ready units of ASRGs for spacecraft in 2016.

So I don't think the technical problems were insurmountable. I don't think beyond technical problems were insurmountable. I don't think any beyond any advanced technology development. That's why we advance technology development at NASA. They tackle the hard stuff. Give you an example, the New Horizons spacecraft going to Pluto right now uses about 11 kilograms of plutonium. And the current production plan in the United States to create new plutonium, first, it doesn't start. You don't have ready plutonium to use until 2019. And then when it's all up and running right now, this is the current plan, they're producing maybe one to one and a half kilograms of usable plutonium fuel per year.

So if you want to fuel an 11-kilogram RTG for a new mission, you're talking about 7 to 11 years just to make it, much less to package up the rest of the spacecraft. So you've really reduced the number of missions that can use plutonium because you're just not making it very fast. The ASRG was supposed to be that linchpin to say, we don't have to make plutonium very fast because we don't need very much of it anymore. But now it doesn't exist. The idea is we increase the total budget of planetary science to $1.5 billion a year. That's our recommended number. These problems fall away. You can afford to do your ASRG. You can afford to keep Cassini flying. And you can start building

new missions to return a sample of Mars, and also to go and explore Europa. A lot of problems are solved if you just bump it up a little bit, but right now they're just right on the edge of things. This is the first of many things I'm sure you will start to see being canceled, severely delayed over the years with this kind of budget they're getting if these continue. Casey Dreyer of the Planetary Society. Now on to a much happier tale. I arrived at Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum early on

the morning of November 18th. I was soon joined by my colleagues Emily Lakdawalla and Bruce Betts, along with a great group of space enthusiasts. We had gathered to watch the launch of MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission. You know Emily is Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist for the Planetary Society. Bruce is the Society's Director of Projects. And we had a couple of surprise guests lined up for our in-person and webcast audiences. By the way, we've got the link to the exciting and informative 90-minute webcast on this week's show page, and you can find that at planetary.org slash radio.

We got underway less than an hour before the scheduled launch. Back in late August, I visited the University of Colorado Boulder. They have there a laboratory called the Laboratory for Atmosphere and Space Physics, or LASP, and that's where Principal Investigator Bruce Joukowsky has led the MAVEN mission. You can hear my conversation with Bruce. That was part of the September 16 Planetary Radio, which you can catch in our archives at planetary.org. I have to tell you, I was thrilled and surprised and a little ashamed

when I really learned about this mission from the people who have been working for so many years to make it come together. I had missed how very, very important this mission is for revealing to us the past history of Mars, including whether there may have been a past history of Mars that included life. Emily, what excites you most about this mission? Well, I think it's trying to answer this question of how we got the Mars that we have today from the Mars that presumably existed in the past. Evidence from a couple of rovers is now strongly suggesting, and also several orbiters, strongly suggesting that Mars did have an environment that had plenty of water to make a nice neutral pH environment to create these clay minerals.

And so something happened to that atmosphere. We want to know how Mars lost its atmosphere, whether it went out into space or down into the rocks, and when that happened and the time sequence of events. And so with MAVEN in the sky and Curiosity on the ground, we're really going to get access to these kinds of scientific questions. One of the things that's really changed in the last 10 years of studying Mars from orbit is that we've long had this idea that Mars used to be wet and now it's dry. There's plenty

of evidence on Mars for these river cut channels, some with gigantic outflows of massive catastrophic floods and others that are just smaller networks of valleys more like we have on Earth. And we've had this idea that Mars was wet and now it's dry. There's actually a slightly more complicated story coming out of the orbiters these days where Mars actually started out dry and got wet at about 3.8, 3.6 billion years ago. I'm not sure how much I believe those precise numbers, but the point is that it was dry, it got wet during a period when the atmosphere was a little bit thicker, and then it got dry again. And so we're beginning to get a more complicated history. And then it's getting even more complicated because we have enough orbiter data now

that we can look very closely at little spots on Mars, and we're finding that Mars' geology is, surprise, just as local as Earth's geology is. So everything wasn't the same in all of the places on Mars at the same time. And the more we study Mars, the more complex the story gets, which, of course, is nice job security for scientists. But this mission really is filling in a big hole in our data, our knowledge, right? Yeah, this is addressing one of the big science questions of Mars, which is what happened to that presumably thick atmosphere early on,

and is that a valid theory that it had a thick atmosphere, and that's what kept liquid water stable on the surface. The background we should probably mention right up early on is that liquid water is not stable at the Mars pressures right now. So liquid water on Mars acts like dry ice or froze carbon dioxide on Earth. It's either a solid, it's either an ice or a gas. It goes back and forth between those two states, except possibly for very brief periods of time that you might generate tiny bits of liquid water. But by and large, it's not stable. So that's when why when we see lots and lots and lots of geologic evidence from orbit, evidence from rovers, all indicating that there was lots of liquid water in Mars' past, even stable in the environment, that you raise the big question, how is that possible? What was different to explore is that you did have a thick atmosphere on Mars generated by things like volcanic activity, but then that atmosphere was stripped away,

particularly after Mars lost its global magnetic field. On Earth, the magnetic field helps protect us, shield us from charged particles coming in from space. On Mars, you've lost the global magnetic field, and so you tend to strip off. You have solar wind particles come in, and they slam into things in the upper atmosphere. They kick them off. There are other ways you can lose it, too.

There's much more of my conversation with Bruce and Emily in the complete webcast, now available on demand. And there's much more of Jim Bell there, too. Jim is an astronomer and planetary scientist at Arizona State University. He's also president of the Planetary Society's Board of Directors. His gloriously beautiful books include Postcards from Mars, Moon 3D, Mars 3D, and his newest, the one I'm reading right now, called simply The Space Book. The man I call the Ansel Adams of Mars was at the Kennedy Space Center for

the MAVEN launch. That's where we contacted him via FaceTime. Jim shared his enthusiasm for the science that this mission will do, but that's not all he was excited about. There's something very, very special about launch day. It focuses your thoughts. It focuses you on the success of the mission that comes down to this point right now. Looking around here, there's all these folks in red shirts. There are MAVEN science team members, engineering team members, launch crew, their families, kids. This is what they've been working for. This is the first critical event, maybe the second critical event. The first critical event was getting selected back in 2006. They won a competition to do this mission. Maybe not so well considered other aspect

of this mission that I'm most interested in, because I'm not involved in the MAVEN science team directly, but I'm very interested in that when they complete their mission, when they finish their primary mission after an Earth year or perhaps even a Mars year, if they get an extension, they'll change their orbit into a relatively circular orbit and act as a communications satellite, a relay satellite, for the missions that are down on the surface. We don't know how long Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnoisseur Orbiter will last. Opportunity is still working.

Happy Sol 3490, by the way, of our 90 Sol mission on Mars. Curiosity is going great, 454, 55 Sols in to its mission. But those missions need the communication satellites, what MRO and Mars Odyssey are doing to get those bits back. And MAVEN will become the newest communication satellite after their primary science mission is completed. So those of us who are working with surface vehicles are really hoping for their great success in their atmosphere's mission and hoping for a long life

for their spacecraft to help us get all those pixels off the surface. Jim, we only got another minute or two before we check in with the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. What should be next on Mars? Assuming MAVEN goes and does exactly what it's intended to do, what would you most like to see in upcoming missions? Well, that's a really good question. I was an advocate, along with some other colleagues, for sort of cluster bombing the planet with Spirit and Opportunity class rovers and really doing those kinds of detailed investigations at five, ten other sites. The landing site selection process identified a huge number of places to go on the planet that are going to tell us about the ancient history of the planet. But that path is not being taken.

Instead, what I think is the next logical thing to do is what NASA is right now planning, which is what the decadal survey calls for, and that's the start of a sample return mission. So the Mars 2020 rover will cache some samples, store them on board, leave them somewhere known, and hopefully a future mission in the 2020s can go grab that cache and bring those samples back to the Earth. I think that is the next step. It's what the community wants. It'll be publicly exciting.

It'll be scientifically incredibly compelling. Professor Jim Bell. He spoke to us live from the November 18th launch of MAVEN. When we return, we'll talk with someone else who is at the Kennedy Space Center, Bill Nye, the science guy. This is Planetary Radio. 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 recapping our live coverage of the exciting

launch of MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, now on its way to the Red Planet. Planetary Radio Live was back at the Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena with an anxious but hopeful crowd. As the countdown continued, we put in a FaceTime call to the Planetary Society's CEO, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill had a great view of the Atlas V rocket that would set the spacecraft on course for Mars. Greetings, everyone.

So where are you? I'm on the balcony of the operations building at Kennedy Space Flight Center, and we are going to leave the Earth here in, I guess, 18 minutes. That is if, as the saying goes, nothing don't happen. Is this just another Mars mission to you? I kind of doubt it. What? What? How can there be such a thing as just another Mars mission? No, it's very exciting. I'm thrilled. We want to know what happened to the climate on Mars so we can learn about the climate on earth. I mean, that's for one thing.

I remind everybody, when we have a space program, it just raises everybody's expectations about everything. It helps us think that we can solve any technical problem because we can put a spacecraft in orbit around Mars. And let me emphasize, around Mars, it's so far away. You've got to go like 35 kilometers a second to get there. It's astonishing. I want to give you a chance to talk about why missions like this and others that are already on Mars are so important to the Planetary Society and why people like our colleague Casey Dreyer and you are working to protect them. Well, the more we know about Mars, the more we'll know about ourselves. And Mars is the most likely place at our current level of understanding of astrobiology to find evidence of life.

And my friends, to me, to my little brain here, it's quite reasonable that there'd be a place on Mars I'm imagining near the equator with some subterranean, some underground ice that gets warmed into some super salty, slushy mix in the summertime. And there's some crazy Martian microbe still alive there. Cannot prove it unless we go have a look but it does not seem it seems extraordinary but not incredible to me and the cost of these missions is so low compared to what we spend our money on the planetary society we advocate for one and a half billion dollars a year for planetary science in contrast the space shuttle which was assembled in the Vehicle Assembly Building and is represented by this workout track here on the field in front of this building, those

missions cost $1.5 billion each. And the current number that NASA likes to throw around is $3.60. So for every dollar we spend on space exploration, we get $3.60 back in investments in innovation in our economy. But I suspect it's quite higher than that because of what I like to call the spiritual aspect of it. That is to say, we have this expectation that we're going to solve technical problems, that the future will be better.

And there's nothing that gives us that like the space program. It's an exciting day, and Mars is part of our heritage as Earthlings in the solar system, and the more we can learn about it, the better. And the MAVEN mission is extraordinarily low cost for the potential scientific return. Bill Nye, the science guy. It was finally time for the launch. We turned to NASA TV for the potential scientific return. Bill Nye, the science guy. It was finally time for the launch. We turn to NASA TV for the final countdown. Here's a somewhat condensed version of the last 60 seconds.

Rock, report range status. 40. Range, range. Stable at step 3. They could still call this off. Setting by for final Atlas and Centaur go. 40. Stable at step 3.

25. Status check. Go Atlas. Go Centaur. Go Maven. 20. Go Maven. 15.

T-minus 10. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 5. 2. 1. Main engine start. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Main engine start, ignition and liftoff of the Atlas V with MAVEN.

Looking for clues about the evolution of Mars through the Atlas V. Go Atlas, go Centaur. Go MAven. Less than an hour later, Maven was on the curving trajectory that will put it in Mars orbit on September 22, 2014. There was just one thing left for us to do in our Planetary Radio Live celebration. So we're going to go to that special program segment now that I've been doing for 11 years with Bruce Betts called What's Up? And it always begins with the Planetary Society Director of Projects telling us what's up in the night sky. I think it's safe to say there's something new in the night sky.

There is. There's a spacecraft. Kind of tough to see. Yeah, good luck. I wouldn't put on your easy night sky objects. Maven's out there. What is easy to see, still, looking fabulous in the evening sky, low in the west, you can see Venus looking like a super bright star. We've got Jupiter coming up around 11 p.m. ish in the east and then up all the rest of the night also looking very bright. Mars that Maven's headed for coming up around 2 in the morning ish over in the east and then high up in the south in the pre-dawn.

We've also in the pre-dawn for a couple challenging objects. We've got Mercury which is plenty bright but low, but it is coming about as high as it's going to come right around now. Low in the east in the pre-dawn sky, so challenge of sunlight. And then Comet ISON, also up there, apparently marginally naked eye visible from a really, really dark site, but you're still even there and certainly anywhere else you're going to want to find or chart and binoculars or a small telescope and that will be brightening. I'll throw out, I did put up a video a week or so ago giving the basics of comet ISON. Is it the comet of the century or a super lame dud? Find out, or at least find out the basics about this comet and why it's gotten so much interest and what the visibility coming up is.

But it is in the pre-dawn sky. It should be getting brighter if it doesn't rip apart over the next week or two. But tougher to see because it is getting closer to the sun and will pass by it on November 28th. Really, really close. Random Space Fact! Very nice. Speaking of Mars, Matt, and we have been, humans have launched spacecraft to Mars,

seven of the last nine Mars launch opportunities. So every 26 months, roughly every two years, you get a good opportunity to send vehicles to Mars. Seven out of nine of the last ones, including this one, humans have sent spacecraft. The two that we didn't hit, we actually had plans for, which was 2001. And those missions were scrapped after the 1999, 98, 99 NASA Mars mission failures. And then in 2009, there were two spacecrafts scheduled to go, both of which got postponed to 2011. We move on to the trivia contest.

We asked our listeners, what are craters on the asteroid Gaspra, first asteroid ever imaged by spacecraft, what are craters on the asteroid Gaspra named after? This just tickled me, so we'll see if it tickles anyone else. Go ahead. It is pretty entertaining. How so we'll see if it tickles anyone else. Go ahead. It is pretty entertaining. How did we do? Very, very well. We've been getting big responses to the contest lately,

and I can tell you that our winner this time, chosen by random.org, is James Miller. James Miller of, oh my gosh, down under, Corumbura in Australia. He's one of those guys who's probably very proud of what's just happened in Canberra only a few minutes ago with this latest mission. And he said, James did, the asteroid Gaspar was named after a spa town in the Crimea, in the Ukraine. So consequently, the asteroid's craters have also been named for resorts and spas worldwide. And he was very proud that he found one, one of the craters is called Moree, M-O-R-E-E, which apparently is a big resort town

down under in Australia. So James, congratulations, we're gonna send you one of those brand new Planetary Radio t-shirts. One other entry, this one came from Bjorn Gede. Now you're going to be able to see it well, but Bjorn also had the right answer about Gaspar being named and its craters named after resorts. He did point out, though, if Galileo, the Jupiter orbiter, had only been able to zoom in a little bit more closely on this asteroid, Gaspar, it might have seen the swimming pool with the little green guy and the person swimming there on that resort asteroid. So get your reservations in now. They fill up fast for the summer. Now.

Maybe next time. All right. So this question is for our listeners at home and those in the audience, but you'll need to submit your answer online. Don't shout it out. Well, it's okay, because, Matt, this is going to be another one where we judge these answers. It's a bit more subjective than usual. So India has just launched the MOM mission, Mars Orbiter Mission.

Feeling left out, I have to ask, if we launched a mission with the acronym DAD, what would it stand for? We'll be looking for the answers that amuse us the most. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to get your entry in. What are they competing for, Matt? Another Planetary Radio t-shirt, but with a bonus this time. This beautiful pristine Maven mission patch that the people here in the Crawford family forum can we get a good ooh please thank you so much right on cue remember you want to entertain us with

this one give it your best shot dad dad by the way I didn't mention that you have until the 25th that'd be Monday November 25th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. We're ready to go to the opportunity for folks here to win one of those Planetary Radio t-shirts. How many spacecraft are currently working at Mars, including both orbiters and surface assets? How many spacecraft are working at Mars right now? My name is Justin. Hey, Justin. How many do you think are out there right now? My name's Justin. Hey, Justin, how many do you think are out there right now? Five. That is correct. Five. Three orbers,

two landers. Good job. Nice work. And he pretty much got it there. Okay. I really need to practice. We'll do one more. All right. One more. From today's launch, what does the acronym MECO stand for? For bonus points you can give BECO but we're going with MECO for the official answer. Hi, what's your name? Julia Scheibmeier main engine cutoff. That is correct. That is a long throw too. Are you up to this? Oh yeah. Here goes.

Oh yes! Yes! Good catch. Thank you so much. Any last thoughts? Go Atlas, go Centaur catch, good catch. Thank you so much. Any last thoughts? Go Atlas, go Centaur, go Maven. Bruce? This has all been very exciting. I love it when things work.

And by the way, do you know the real reason it launched successfully today? No. I did not go to Florida to watch it. I've heard that. I've heard that. It's the Betts jinx. I've heard of this, yeah. When I go, they delay the launch.

They work eventually, but not while I'm there. And everyone go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about ions. Thank you, and good night. I want to thank everybody for joining in with us at this terrific event, seeing yet another emissary from Earth make its way to the red planet. And as Emily said, go Atlas, go Centaur, go MAVEN. And go Southern California Public Radio. We want to thank KPCC once again for hosting us here today.

We have a big hand for them. And all the great KPCC people who got up earlier than normal today and made everything work here so well. Best of luck, MAVEN, as it heads for Mars. Take care. Thank you. work here so well. Best of luck, Maven, as it heads for Mars. Take care.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies, and Go Maven! Music Music Music Music