Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live Celebrates the Mars Rovers

Episode Date: January 28, 2014

Opportunity has been rolling across Mars for 10 years! We celebrate the Mars Exploration Rovers and their sisters on the red planet at Planetary Radio Live, this week featuring MER Principal Investigator Steve Squyres. Emily Lakdawalla and Bill Nye join Mat in front of a capacity crowd at Southern California Public Radio’s Crawford Family Forum. Bruce Betts closes the show with a live Random Space Fact and rover trivia contest.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Happy 10th anniversary on Mars, everyone. That's how long opportunity the Mars Exploration Rover has been exploring the Red Planet. This week we celebrate Oppie, her sister Spirit, their big sister Curiosity, and little Sojourner that set us to roving Mars back in 1997. We'll begin with excerpts from the January 23rd rover party we held at KPCC, Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum, in collaboration with the next People, Science, Tomorrow series that I host for SCPR. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

We're back with Plan Rad Live in front of another full house here in Pasadena, not far from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the robotic space exploration capital of the world, and the birthplace of every rover that has gone to Mars. We have gathered to celebrate the spirit of exploration, the unforeseen opportunities that always result from exploring, and the curiosity that drives this basic human need. You'll hear Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers, Steve Squires.

That's coming up in just a few moments. But right now, I want to welcome the CEO of the Planetary Society, my boss and friend, Bill Nye the Science Guy. friend, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. listening online as we celebrate 10 years of exploring Mars with these extraordinary two rovers that were launched back in 2004. And they were supposed to run for three Martian months.

And one of them is, well, one went six years. The other's gone 10 years. This would be equivalent to buying a car with a three-year warranty and driving it for 120 years. That is extraordinary. That is worth celebrating. So I say all the time, planetary science is, first of all, NASA is the best brand the United States has. And planetary science is right now what NASA does best. So this is really, it's a great thing to be celebrating. I'll say.

First, though, please give a warm welcome to the Planetary Society's senior editor and planetary evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla. Good to see you again, Emily. Thank you, Matt. I am looking forward to, as is everybody else here, looking at some of your hand-picked images. Can you take us through those? Sure. Well, Matt always asks me to give him my favorite images, and I always tell them that I do not have favorites. I found a different way to say it tonight.

You did. Although this is a radio show. I do get to pick a theme, though. I didn't have a good answer. But we're on video now. And I decided that I wanted to talk about how the images were used not just as snapshots of pretty places, because that's how we tend to use them, but as images that help us document the kinds of awesome science that these rovers are doing.

of awesome science that these rovers are doing. And I want to begin by acknowledging the rover that literally broke the path for the future rovers that came after it. This is the Pathfinder Lander, which landed on Mars in 1997 and brought with it this little experimental thing that weighed only 20 pounds, 11 kilograms. And it was the Sojourner rover, a much smaller rover, much less capable than the ones we have now. But Sojourner demonstrated to us the power of carrying a science package on a mobile platform and being able to drive across the surface of Mars. This is an unusual view from the Pathfinder lander. Pathfinder was a lander. It didn't move, but it did have this rover that could move within the landscape.

And so if we zoom into this view, what you'll see is a whole bunch of little rovers. Now, it didn't actually carry this many rovers. This is just the position that the rover took in very many different sols over the course of the 83 Sol mission, all the different rocks and spots that Sojourner managed to explore during the mission. You can see that Sojourner scuffed soil and crawled on rocks and even started wandering off into the distance toward the end there. And in fact, we've seen Sojourner scuffed soil and crawled on rocks and even started wandering off into the distance toward the end there. And in fact, we've seen Sojourner from space and seen the little rover down a little bit to the south of the Pathfinder lander. And Sojourner really demonstrated to us

the power of roving Mars to put science instruments right up against rocks. Okay, so fast forward about a decade, and we get to spirits landing on Mars. And the moment that spirit landed was absolutely awesome. But I have to say there's something slightly disappointing about that first image because, you know, it doesn't look a whole lot different from the Pathfinder landing site except that it's even flatter, which is not what geologists want. Geologists like mountains and things you can climb and go see the rocks. So that was a little sad.

But it was awesome that we were on Mars, but still it was just a flat landscape with some rocks on it. And then Opportunity landed. And the moment that we got this first picture from Opportunity and we saw the wall of this crater with bedrock cropping out of that wall, all of the geologists in the room absolutely screamed. They were so excited that we finally had, yeah.

There were geologists jumping up and down and running around in circles. They were so excited to see this in-place bedrock that we could read to tell the story of Mars. You still are excited. I still am excited. I don't think I will never be not excited about this first picture that we got from Opportunity. And if you look down at the right side of that outcrop, this is what it looked like when Opportunity, being a rover, managed to drive up to it and see it. There were thin layers. Those layers told us about water and wind shaping the surface of Mars. You look at it even closer and you see these little blueberries embedded in the rocks, and those told us about water running through these rocks and dissolving some elements and

concentrating them elsewhere. And we had this lengthy history of water on Mars that Opportunity told us all about. Well, not to be outdone, Spirit did finally manage to get to some watery story rocks on Mars, but it took a little while. First, they said, well, maybe if we drive to a crater like the one that Opportunity is in, we'll be able to find some nice bedrock that we can explore. And they did that. The crater was named Bonneville. And oh my God, was Bonneville disappointing because it was just a dust-filled hole in the ground with no bedrock as far as the eye could see. I think Rob Manning is pointing out that you can see actually the broken back shell is that or is that the heat shield? The heat shield is up in the on the left side of this image but there wasn't any bedrock and that was sad so

they looked off into the distance and they said those hills we got to start climbing mountains. It was going to take a long time was going to be a be a long drive. The rover only had a three-month warranty, and it was going to be a lot longer than three months to get there. It turned out to be 157 sols and three kilometers of driving, but they finally got to those mountains, and the moment they reached those mountains, they hit pay dirt. This really wacky-looking rock cropping up out of the ground, look at that rock's shadow. Look at the shapes of the weird little beans on stocks cropping out of this rock. They called this pot of gold.

It was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow after that long drive. And it had hematite in it. It had minerals that told us about water on Mars. It was weird, but finally spirit was telling us that water on Mars story that we had sent spirit there to study. And there again is a picture of pot of Gold on the left and another really bizarre rock to the right of it called Bread Box, I think, that was all eaten up inside. And so Spirit continued to climb mountains.

And once you start climbing mountains, I don't care about the science anymore. The landscape is just really awesome. And this is one of my favorite pictures from Spirit's mountain climb where we got to see the landscape that we had come from and the landscape that we were about to explore. Well, okay, fast forward another 10 years and we get to Curiosity, which landed again in a pretty flat spot, but there is a mountain right there that we were going to explore. Now, it's going to take us a while to get there. It's been more than 520 sols already, and we're still got a long way to go. But as soon as Curiosity started driving, again, bedrock cropping right up out of the ground, looking like broken concrete in the middle of a sidewalk. You look at it up close, and it looks even more like broken concrete.

It's an aggregate. It's got round pebbles embedded in a finer-grained matrix that tells us that those round pebbles say that there was a river running across this Martian landscape, tumbling rocks. It was somewhere between ankle and hip deep, running across the surface of Mars. Just think about that for a second. And that's the bedrock that Curiosity, with its amazing science package, is now able to explore on the surface of Mars.

Curiosity kept driving and came to this geologist's wonderland, bedrock as far as the eye can see. More stories to tell with layers upon layers of different kinds of rocks and like any good geologist curiosity carries a hand lens that you can look at the rocks up close and see little sand grains that tell you about how strong the wind or in this case again water was that was moving these little pebbles along the ground little granules the biggest ones are about three millimeters across. And so now this is a view that Curiosity took, a Sol 468, about two months ago, so not too long ago. And we still got a long way to drive to get to the mountain, but we're going to keep driving and keep driving. And eventually,

we're going to get to the rocks that are at the base of that mountain that contain clay minerals and sulfate minerals. And the science is going to be absolutely fantastic. And the mountain is huge, right? The mountain is enormous. Curiosity is not guaranteed to climb this mountain, okay? If you look at the top of this mountain that you can see here, that's actually not the top of the mountain. It's still just near the bottom. That stuff is all windblown sediments, most likely, maybe, except we could get up close and find out something different entirely.

That's why we're going, after all. If we knew what was there, we wouldn't be exploring it. But down close to the bottom, there are some really, really awesome- looking rocks that I can't wait to read and tell the geologic story. Emily Lakawala, don't go away, Emily. I want you to stick around to help us welcome our first very distinguished special guest, who has led the Mars Exploration Rover mission for, I think it's safe to say, far longer than he or anybody else ever imagined possible. He was a student of Carl Sagan. Now he teaches some of the classes that Carl Sagan taught. Please welcome Goldwyn Smith, professor of astronomy at Cornell University, Steve Squires.

Hey there. Hey, Steve. We can actually make this Skype thing work. I'm sorry I can't be there myself, but there are just too many celebrations going on on both sides of the country right now. Yeah, but that's exactly what should be happening right now, and we're really honored that you could be here for this part of this. Where are you right now? Let us know. I'm in my hotel room in our nation's capital where it is freezing cold. I hope it's warmer where you are.

Quite a bit, as you probably know. First of all, congratulations again on the glorious success of these two little rovers. The story's not over yet, as we know. Opportunity still alive and kicking, as we've already heard. What is she up to right now? Right now, we're looking at something really strange. A couple weeks ago, a weird thing happened where we imaged some bedrock that we had seen just a few days before. And a few days before, it's just flat bedrock. And then we looked at it again, and there was this rock about this big sitting there that hadn't been there previously. It was a strange looking rock. It's white around the outside. It's red in the middle. I keep saying it looks like a jelly donut and when i say red it's not like mars red it's like raspberry jam red it's very strange looking we don't know

exactly how it got there our best theory is that a few days earlier we had been uphill from this spot a meter or two and we did a like a pirouette a turn in place and because the right front steering actuator on this thing doesn't turn properly anymore when we do a move like that it's going to kind of chatter across the ground and we think we kind of tiddly winked a rock up out of the ground and it moved a meter or two downhill and then it obligingly flipped itself upside down so now we get to see a side of it that hasn't seen the Martian atmosphere in maybe billions of years. So we've been looking at this thing, and we've taken pictures with a microscope,

and we've been looking at the chemistry. The chemistry is really weird, this very, very strange assemblage of sulfate salts here, which might have precipitated down beneath the ground. I've got to say, we don't know yet where it came from. The place that we think it came from is currently invisible to us because the solar arrays are in the way. So we're going to kind of back off and turn and take a look and I think we'll probably see like a little divot or socket that it came out of. Steve Squires of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission at our rover celebration. We'll continue

in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your video. and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water in 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. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're listening to Mars Exploration Rover Principal Investigator Steve Squires Change the world! Family Forum. Bill Nye and Emily Lakdawalla were on stage with me as Steve was telling us about the rock he described as looking like a jelly donut. Bill had another question about this sudden appearance right next to Rover Opportunity. Are we expecting a white divot like the other side of the rock? That's a great question. We've been arguing exactly that point on the team, and one of the things we want to do is find the hole, because there should be a complementary surface from which the jelly

donut emerged. It's actually named as Pinnacle Island, and I should probably just call it that instead of this jelly donut nonsense. It's too late now. It's gone viral. The jelly donut is pretty famous now. There were other theories, of course. You were in a press briefing earlier today, and there was a question through social media that came from the original Captain Kirk, William Shatner. What was his theory? Yes. He was wondering if Martians were throwing rocks at us, and I told him probably not. But another theory that we've talked about is, it's what I call the smoke and hole in the ground theory, that somehow in that four-day period, an impact crater formed somewhere that we haven't seen yet nearby and a piece of ejecta, stuff thrown out of the crater, just happened to land right in front of us. My gut tells me that that one's unlikely, but we'll check it out. Emily, you look like you'd love to ask a question.

Well, yeah, you know, I can't help but notice as you're speaking that you're talking about the rover's wheels moving and your arms are doing this. You're gesticulating wildly. How much do you identify physically with the physical being of those rovers on another planet? Stop right there, Emily, because I'm going to call you out on this one. I was listening to you when you were talking about curiosity. And you said, it's going to take us a long time to get there but we're going to get to the top you're in pasadena you're not on mars i'm in dc but we use that right now that's the beauty that's the beauty is that we create these things and then

we project ourselves into them not just the, not just the engineers who built them, not just the scientists who operate them, but we, all of us, everybody on this planet who is interested in what goes on on Mars, those rovers are the embodiment of our dreams, our aspirations, our hopes, and we feel like we're there. It's a wonderful thing. It's a way to project a human presence onto another world. And yeah, I feel that way, and obviously so do you. You had a press briefing today where you talked about a new science paper publication about the clays that you're finding on Endeavor's Rim. I'm wondering if you can tell the crowd here a little bit about how the Mars that's recorded in Endeavor's rim is different from the Mars that's recorded in

the rocks that Opportunity was exploring before she got to Endeavor's rim? Yeah, that's a really good question because the Mars that we've seen through most of Opportunity's mission is different from the Mars of today, dramatically. But the Mars that we reported on in our recent science paper was different again when we crossed the boundary from the meridiani plains into the rim of endeavor crater it's just like what you described where we crossed the boundary from the gusev plains onto the columbia hills everything changed and in both cases we were going from sort of middle-aged Martian rocks to really ancient Martian rocks. And the ancient Mars that we see preserved in the rim of Endeavor clearly had water. I mean, we see fractures as wide as your thumb that are filled with pure gypsum, which is a salt of calcium sulfate that precipitates from liquid

water. So clearly water was coursing through these rocks. But the particularly interesting thing that we found recently with these aluminum-rich clays, these incredible concentrations of aluminum-rich clays that we report in our new paper, is unlike the water that was out on the plains. You know, we talk about water on Mars, water on Mars at the Opportunity Site. It's really sulfuric acid on Mars that we find evidence for. It was very low pH. It was nasty stuff if you're, you know, most forms of life. But the water that flowed through these fractures at this place we call Esperance, which is what we report on in our recent paper, it was neutral. It was neutral pH.

It was water you could drink. And that's very ancient. These are the oldest rocks we've ever seen with the Opportunity rover. And so what we're seeing is that despite the fact that kind of middle-aged Mars had what was apparently a kind of acid environment, very early Mars, it was much more life-friendly. Steve, I want to throw one more at you, and this is more of a human-related one. It's this location on Mars that you have named after a great explorer that we lost just a few months ago. Yes, yeah, this was very important to us.

There are many wonderful things about having been on Mars for 10 years, but one of the sad things, the tragic things about a mission of this duration is that over the course of the mission, you lose friends and colleagues and leaders. As you know, not too long ago, Bruce Murray passed away, and Bruce was one of just the towering figures of planetary science. Of course, he had, obviously, a huge role as the founder of the Planetary Society. He was a sedimentologist. He was a Mars scientist of great renown.

He wrote papers back in the 60s that are still widely cited today. He really is one of the truly great figures in the history of our field. And so when Bruce passed away, we felt very strongly that we needed to find a feature on Mars that had characteristics that were appropriate for naming after him. We spent a little time. We spent some time finding the right thing. But as we head to the south from our current location, we're going to be climbing this massive ridge.

It'll be the tallest thing, if we can get up it, that either one of our rovers has ever climbed. It's higher than the highest point that we climbed in the Columbia Hills. And we name that ridge that we're ascending towards what we call the mother load, the place where we think the highest concentrations of clays are. We name that Murray Ridge in Bruce's honor. Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Steve Squires. You'll hear a bit more from Steve at our rover celebration on next week's show,

when he'll be joined by Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger, Jet Propulsion Lab Director of Mars Engineering Rob Manning, and astronomer-author-explorer Jim Bell. Why wait? You can watch the entire two-hour webcast that includes the great pictures Emily talked about. We've got a link from this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. Just one more guy to hear from this week. We have finished Planetary Radio the same way every week for more than 11 years by spending a few minutes

with my friend, astronomer, planetary scientist, and the Planetary Society director of projects, Bruce Betts. Hi, Bruce. Hello. You're remarkably chipper for a guy who's been sick as a dog. By the way, thanks for mentioning that. I had both Rob Manning and John Gratzinger dive away from me. You mentioned me coming out of my sickbed. Tell us about the night sky. It's a fun time right now because all five planets that you can see with the unaided eye are actually visible right now. Of course, you'll have to stay up all night to do it, but that's workable.

So in the evening sky, if you look low in the west, you can actually catch Mercury for the next week, week to two weeks. And in the east, shining super bright, we've got Jupiter looking quite stunning and lovely. In the middle of the night, we've got Mars coming up looking reddish as always in the east, and then Saturn coming up a couple hours later. And in the east, in the pre-dawn, very low, coming up super bright Venus. So you can just track them all through the night. A lot to look at. We move on to this week in space history, look at? We move on to this week in space history, and it is the week of remembrance for the U.S. space program. Every astronaut in the U.S. space program who died related to a spacecraft accident died this week. That includes the Apollo 1 fire, the Challenger accident, and the Columbia accident.

the Challenger accident and the Columbia accident. Exploring is not always a safe activity. On the good side, we've got 1958, Explorer 1 was launched by JPL, becoming the first successful American orbiting spacecraft. One, two, three. Random Space Fact. Wow. Brilliant. All right.

Ten years ago, when Opportunity landed, as well as when Spirit landed, they carried mini-DVDs made of silica glass provided by the Planetary Society that each carried four million names of people who wanted to send their names to the surface of Mars through a names collection with NASA and Lego. Also include simulated Lego bricks and simulated Lego minifigure, Astrobots, who told their stories on Mars for a while. You want to learn

more about this, learn about Opportunity Spirit, I don't know if you mentioned, we have our website, planetary.org slash rover party. You can celebrate the 10-year anniversary with all sorts of good videos from Bill, from me, from others, as well as background information, games, festivities. It's a party.

We're going to go on to the contest. Now, we don't have the winner of the contest that we put up two weeks ago, but you can still tell people the question and tell them the answer. I asked you out there in Radioland, what northern hemisphere constellation is often likened to the shape of a W? A letter W or a letter M, depending on time of year, time of night. The answer I was looking for, you can probably find various star collections that look that way, but the most commonly referred to is Cassiopeia. Cassiopeia, off in the north. A round of applause for Cassiopeia. That's a Cassiopeia fan outiopeia, off in the north. A round of applause for Cassiopeia.

There's a Cassiopeia fan out there, yeah. Why not? For next time, tell us the three rovers that have roved the farthest on bodies other than Earth. The three rovers in history

that have gone the farthest in their roving on bodies other than Earth, go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Well done. Thank you. You scared me for a moment. And you've got until Monday, February 3rd. That's Monday the 3rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. And you may win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

But there are folks in here tonight who are also about to get that opportunity. And we have some other very special items brought to us by our friend Doug Ellison from JPL who has been out in the lobby showing off things like these wonderful wheels. Oh, they took away my Sojourner wheel, the one that could hurt you.

It's sitting over there now. You know what Doug pointed out? Each successive rover had a wheel that was exactly twice as large as the one before. That's because they don't have calculators at JPL. It was so much simpler to figure out. We will start with a Planetary Radio t-shirt. And because of that, I'm familiar with trying to throw and not hurt people. I'm less clear how I'm going to throw these and not hurt people.

So, name four Mars rovers. Hi, sir. What's your name? My name is James Creeley, and I'm a Ph.D. student at Fuller. Cool. Name those rovers. Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. Excellent. Well done. Bravo. We throw a shirt. We have some options for size exchange,

but we'll start with on top. Oh, it hits my mother in the head. I'm sorry. Oh, God. Matt's never going to forgive me. I'm sorry. You'll be hearing from our attorneys. It's hungadanga, hungadanga, hungadanga, and hungadanga.

Okay. I don't think I can go on. All right, now one near and dear to our Planetary Society CEO as well as our Planetary Society president, the calibration target for the cameras on the last three rovers also was noted by a certain Bill Nye to look like something else, which led to a whole program of education of students from around the world coming in a Planetary Society program to do something with them. What do the calibration targets for the cameras also look like? And function apps.

And we will give away this, but I won't throw it. Sundial. Yes, sundial. Those are the Mars dials. And you won yourself a beautiful set of pictures. No, we'll get it to you later. You don't need to get it. We promise we won't give it to anybody else.

These pictures from the Mars Exploration Rover mission. We have one more, which Doug Ellison tells me is a very rare item. They were fighting for this at the recent American Geophysical Union show. And let's see who's going to get this one. Name the lander on Mars after Opportunity. What landed next? Hi there, what's your name? I'm Zan Sun.

Was it the Phoenix lander? That is correct, the Phoenix lander. All right. You can get this from Matt after the show because you can trust this man. This wonderful man and his wonderful family who don't believe in lawsuits. I should have said you'll hear from our law firm

of Howard Howard and Fine. There it is, the NASA Science 2014 calendar and has just been won over there. I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look out for the night sky, and think about what size tires you'd put on a rover on Mars. Thank you, and good night. Just get the steel-belted ones.

And the winner of this week's space trivia contest, it's Tom Colbert of Waterford in Ireland. Congratulations, Tom. We'll send your year in space calendar across the pond very soon. More of our live rover celebration next week. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by the party-loving members of the Society. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова