Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - PLANETARY RADIO LIVE: Celebrating Rover Curiosity

Episode Date: December 17, 2012

The leaders of the Curiosity mission join Bill Nye, Emily Lakdawalla and host Mat Kaplan for a live conversation about the thrilling mission on Mars.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena, California, this is Planetary Radio Live. Here's your host, the Planetary Society's Matt Kaplan. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. It was one year ago that we gathered here to preview the mission of Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. We could only hope that this mighty robotic explorer would land safely on the red planet. A year and seven minutes of terror later, that emissary from Earth is more than four months into a voyage of discovery that is beginning to unwrap some of Mars' deepest secrets. We'll talk with the leaders of that mission, project manager Richard Cook and project scientist John Gratzinger.

Joining us on stage will be the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, our terrific musical guests, our hedgehog Swing. We'll hear from them again later and we'll welcome Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up, including the chance for a few people in our audience to play the space trivia game. Now, what if Curiosity had no cameras? It would still be able to do fantastic science, but we'd be denied some of the most beautiful, exotic, and revealing images in the history of planetary science.

And when you talk about images like these, you're smart to include one of my Planetary Society colleagues in that conversation. Please welcome Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla. Thank you, Matt. Hey, Emily. You know, you write about Curiosity just about every week in your blog at planetary.org, and you always include fascinating images. Thank you for sharing a few of them with us today.

This rover is an extension of ourselves. It's like all other spacecraft that we've sent out into the solar system. It's a robot that goes to places that we can't go to bring us there to places that we can't explore ourselves yet. So Curiosity has been sent to Mars to send back amazing photos. Some of them are really wide gorgeous views of its environment like this beautiful view of Gale Crater that was returned just the day or two after landing. It takes in nearly all of its environment, including the huge mountain at the center of the crater, which is really what brought us here. It

contains toward its base some really amazing rocks. It returns lots of other really gorgeous photos. This is one of my particular favorites because it shows these beautiful rocky hills, and then in the middle distance, these rounded, hazy mountains. And actually you'd think that there was a hazy sky behind that, but that's actually even more crater wall behind those rounded mountains. So this is one of the most mountainous areas we have ever seen on Mars, and it's thanks to the precision landing technology that they developed at JPL to get this thing on the ground. The thing is, though, that our favorite photos that we get from the spacecraft

are the ones that have pieces of the spacecraft in it because they remind us that this is a human-built artifact that was sent to this place to explore on our behalf. I thought I'd tell you a little bit about the different cameras that have taken these pictures. Curiosity has 17 cameras, and here are pictures of 13 of them. There's a bunch of them on top of the mast. You can see nav cams, the two different-sized mast cams that give Curiosity her lopsided look. There's Mali, which is the Mars hand lens

imager. It's on the end of the robotic arm there. There's forward haz cams. Those are mounted on the belly of the rover to see the environment right in front of it. And there's another set of four of those in the back of the rover. And then there's one more. It's kind of hard to see, called Marty. And that was the one that caught the amazing descent video as it was going down to the surface, and it's still used to take photos of the soil on the ground. Those different cameras, there's so many of them, because each one is a different compromise among wide view, narrow view, color, black and white. The nav cams are used to take really wide angle shots just to say, where are we? What's the environment around me? The Mastcam 34 focuses a little bit closer. It takes about nine Mastcam 34 photos

to cover one NavCam picture. And then the Mastcam 100, again, it takes nine of those to cover one of these. And it takes nine of these to cover one of those. Nine times nine, that's 81 of these photos are necessary to cover one of the nav cam photos. So what Curiosity does is it gets to a place after a drive, and it takes a 360-degree panoramic view with the nav cam using 12 nav cam pictures.

Scientists zoom in. They say, hey, those rocks look pretty cool. Let's take some color photos of them with the Mastcam 34, and that's what this is. You can zoom in on that and say, hey, those rocks look really cool. I'd like to see those at really high resolution. So then they take a Mastcam 100 photo of it. You can zoom in and see all kinds of cool structure around these rocks. Some of my favorite is the kind of stuff that indicates those are cross beds.

That tells you that there was either wind or water flowing through here and depositing the sediments that made these finely laminated rocks. And there's a lot of geologic history to be told here. Some of my favorite photos are the ones that are most mysterious. At a forum that I'm the administrator of, we've been looking at these things. We call them mud bubbles. We have no idea what they are. I don't think the science team knows what they are either. They're not really what we came here to look for. We came here to look at other kinds of rocks, but they're really fun to investigate. So the most wonderful thing about all of these pictures is that they are shared on the internet virtually as soon as they come down to Earth. And you can go to JPL's website and find the raw images and see them for yourself and enjoy the daily adventures of this rover. So I want to thank

the mission for sharing that data with us and allowing us to come along in that adventure. What you said about those images that include curiosity itself, the self-portraits, take me right back to when you and I and Bill were standing in the clean room in our bunny suits, a few feet away from that thing that is now up there crawling around on Mars. You should probably explain to people what a bunny suit is. It doesn't involve ears. It's like a sterile garment that you have to wear

to keep from contaminating the hardware that's about to be sent to Mars. And yeah, that was really awesome. I didn't really want to like Curiosity at the beginning because I love the Mars Exploration Rover so much. And they were so symmetrical and pretty. And Curiosity is kind of lumpy and stuff. But when I stood next to her in the clean room, I was like, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready for this mission to land on Mars. This is going to be awesome. She's winking at us the whole time, too, with those off-center asymmetrical eyes. Ladies and gentlemen, Emily's not going anyplace. She's going to join us for the main segment today

when we sit down with Bill and our special guest to talk more about Curiosity. But before that happens, we're going to welcome back, from my hometown of Long Beach, California, here they are, Hedgehog Swing. Thank you. Thank you. Hedgehog Swing. And they're so much more attractive than the band in the movie. We'll hear from the guys again later in today's show and in next week's episode of Planetary Radio as well. You can learn more about them on Facebook. Just search for Hedgehog Swing. We'll be right back with Richard Cook, John Grotzinger, and Bill Nye, the science guy, in a minute.

This is Planetary Radio Live. 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 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 Live.

I'm Matt Kaplan. It's standing room only at Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum, where I am pleased to welcome the Chief Executive Officer of the Planetary Society, my boss, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Greetings, greetings. Thank you, Matt. I know how you feel about this period in history, this age of exploration. Do you think it has parallels in human history? There's an expression, the new world, where these people in Europe came to the Americas and they discovered some astonishing things

that's changed the course of history, I think for everybody on Earth pretty much. My friends, we are exploring Mars. And I say we, humankind is exploring Mars. Every day we find something remarkable. But it's quite likely, for me anyway, if it's not the next two years, certainly the next ten years, we will find something astonishing, something that will change the course of human history.

I mean, just think, just everybody, just imagine what it would be like if you found evidence of life on Mars. I mean, it would mean that we are not alone. And then stranger still, let's say it's fossil bacteria of some sort, fossil pond scum. Would it have DNA? Is it possible that we started out on Mars and we're all here? I mean, it's crazy, but it's within scientific possibility. The other thing that's quite likely, if I can hang on here and live for another 30 years, we will have to deflect an asteroid.

That is not a crazy thing. And we will be the first humans in history with that capability. Who knows? Maybe that's why we've never heard from another civilization is they didn't pass the asteroid test. And so you've got to have a space program, and you've got to be able to give one a little nudge or a little push. It's quite a time to be alive. And, you know, I'm now the CEO of the Planetary Society, which was formed at a time when people like Carl Sagan and Ray Bradbury, the head of JPL, Bruce Murray, and Lou Friedman, were very concerned that public support of space exploration was high,

but government funding was not. And we are at that same crossroads, where the Curiosity rover has gotten everybody in the world excited about exploring Mars and other worlds, and yet not just the United States, but in governments around the world, the support of space exploration is not what you might expect, especially if I can use the term only 300 million a year, which I know doesn't go as far as it used to, but it goes a long way in space.

Bill, thank you. That's what it's all about. I'm glad you could join us, and we also have Emily up here, as promised, for our discussion with our very special guests, who I'd like to bring up now. Richard Cook of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is project manager for Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. He has been with JPL since 1989 and has worked on many other missions, serving as deputy project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity. Please welcome Richard Cook to Planetary Radio Live.

Thanks for coming. John Gratzinger has been Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology at Caltech since 2005, though his history at the school began much earlier than that. In 2007, he received the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. As project scientist for Curiosity, he represents and leads the many researchers who eagerly await every bit of data returned by the rover. Help me welcome John Rotzinger. gentlemen Emily, Bill and I can hardly wait to talk with you but I've got a treat to share first

as you know the Planetary Society hosted thousands of enthusiastic fans at our Planet Fest celebration of Curiosity's landing we watched you and your colleagues on gigantic screens at the Pasadena Convention Center as that spacecraft plummeted down through the atmosphere of Mars. It really was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life, and I know that a lot of other people feel the same way. Here is a compressed

look at the triumphant climax of that day. You check this good Images? Heads up folks! Fly ADL images are starting to come in. What? You gotta put me up. Humans at the best! Please. It's worth celebrating. What a night. It just was tremendous.

It brings out the best in us, Matt. It brings out the best in humans. I hope all of you were participating in one way or another, watching our webcast, watching the JPL webcast. It was truly a triumph of human ingenuity and capability. And what a way to celebrate our sense of wonder, which is really what this is about. John and Richard, as great as that day was, wasn't it really just a prelude to the real magic of what this mission is about? John? Yeah, I think we're on our way

and have a really good sense for what the mission is going to hold now in terms of looking forward to all the great discoveries the instruments will make. So we're excited to be doing that. The project, from the very first day I worked on it, has been an amazing voyage because I mean the engineering challenges you face and getting through the development, the joy of seeing the launch and the slight sorrow and seeing the vehicle leaving the earth,

the landing obviously was a great event by in itself and then as John said what we're doing on the surface is just going to amaze people I, in the long run. I think people will also be amazed by how sophisticated and capable this rover is. I think people understand the skill or whatever challenge of landing on Mars. But to actually explore the surface of another planet is its own challenge, and we're still learning how to do that. Richard, you were one of those blue shirts, of course, in that room. I should have worn it today. I don't know what I was thinking. I wish you had. But describe the feeling. Had you ever gone through

anything like that in your life? I mean, yes, because I had been there when Spirit and Opportunity landed and Pathfinder. But as I said at the time, it doesn't, it never gets old. It's an amazing feeling. And there's a, I don't know, it's sort of an Einstein relativity thing where time is doing all kinds of weird things as you're getting close

that for a while it's going real fast and then it slows down and you wonder why it's taking so personal experience yeah your personal experience feels like you're in a space capsule or something but anyway it's definitely a great time and just to see everybody so happy just makes me smile every time john were you in that room or were you off someplace with the other scientists biting your nails uh no i was i was in the room i were you off someplace with the other scientists biting your nails? No, I was in the room. I had visited the science team earlier. And what Richard describes is exactly the feeling you get even as a first-timer because it's like all of a sudden time is expanding and collapsing.

And one minute you think you're in another test, and the next minute you realize it's real. And it's the most amazingly complex emotion that you feel. There's a lot of focus here on the landing and on how that was seven minutes of terror coming down to the surface, but you've described a lot how there's been a lot more terror for the science. You're still not done yet getting through that terror that it takes to find out if your mission is really going to give you the science you want. Yeah,'s, it took a little bit longer than seven weeks, but we would call it seven weeks of terror until you're done checking out all the instruments, and then you need to do things over again to make sure that you got the results that you thought

you got, and that takes a few extra weeks, and now we'll have seven months of terror wondering if we'll ever make it to Mount Sharp, and when you're on the science end of it, it just sort of keeps on going, and you wonder what you're ever going to find. So don't you just want to walk up to the thing and shake it or tap on it and see if the gauge is moving? It must drive you crazy to be so far away and unable to literally get your hands on it. Yeah, for me personally, there's been no more emotion than I've felt in wanting to just strangle myself from times when you realize that you just want to walk through the computer screen and turn the rock over.

Yeah, as a geologist, it must be frustrating to not be able to touch the rock yourself, right? It's a little bit like playing pinball when you have the flippers. You just wish you could get the ball. If I could just hit it with my thumb, it would just be fine. What's the next experiment? What are we going to do? I mean, I'm looking. Emily was describing these rocks, and I don't know anything about rocks.

But I can tell that water flowed there. I mean, even I can tell. So what's next? Well, so what we do now is after we sat around for almost two months processing the soil, we drove pretty much as quickly as possible and getting some chemical information. Hey, how fast is quickly? Not fast. You know, the rover goes, you know,

one-tenth of a mile per hour maximum speed, and so it's not going very fast. It's slow and... Slow but steady. Slow but steady, that's right. And, you know, we have to fight against the fact that it's real cold. Actually, I had less of an issue with the speed is, you know, the fact that we want to avoid hazards.

And in particular on Mars, like I said, one of the challenges of learning how to operate a rover on Mars, I worked on Sojourner, you know, 15 years ago where we were worried about rocks, about running into rocks. With this thing, we don't really worry about running into rocks. We worry about getting trapped and getting into soil hazards that we can't get out of. And so we need to be careful at the beginning to not push too hard. As impatient as we are to get going, I have to say this rover has gotten going in terms of driving a lot faster than Spirit and Opportunity, and I guess it's probably Spirit and Opportunity that have allowed you to do that.

Yeah, absolutely. It's great to have sort of a test bed on Mars, right, a demonstration. Because we don't do these missions that often, they feel like it's a new thing, right, that we just sort of started it again for the first time. But in fact, with each of these missions, we're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants before us, right, certainly all the way back to Viking, you know, in terms of how you land, how do you operate a rover or a vehicle on the surface. We've learned, and we get better every time. We're out of time, but only for this week's portion of our conversation.

Radio and podcast listeners, join us next time for much more with Curiosity Project scientist John Gratzinger and project manager Richard Cook, along with Emily Lakdawalla and Bill Nye of the Planetary Society. This is Planetary Radio. Planetary Society. This is Planetary Radio. We're in Pasadena at Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum, ready to introduce my partner for what we call What's Up. Please welcome Astronomer and Planetary Society Director of Projects, Bruce Betts. Hey. Hey.

Hey, thank you. Thank you, everyone. It's great to be here. Yeah, it's great to have you back. Nice tie. Thank you very much. It's a great holiday for those on the radio. Yeah, it's very colorful for those of you listening on the radio

or maybe with infrared cameras or something. There you go. Go ahead. Quick, stray story. I don't usually do, but it dawned on me as I was listening in the talk about Mount Sharp. I actually had Bob Sharp at Caltech, for whom it is named, for field geology, and he got so mad at me for continuing to call him Dr. Sharp or Professor Sharp, he threatened to throw me out of the class.

So I'm just going to call it Mount Bob from now on. Okay. Can you guys arrange that as we still have our guests here, John and Richard? It's Mount Bob from here on out. What's up? Well, up in the evening sky, you've still got Jupiter rising around sunset, and it's high overhead in the early evening over there in the east looking super bright. And in the pre-dawn, also over in the east, we've got Venus super bright, but getting pretty darn low. Above that, easy to see the much dimmer yellowish Saturn. And if you have a really

clear view to the horizon, you look right after shortly after sunset below Venus, you might still be able to catch Mercury. All right, we move on to this week in space history. 1903, first powered flight by the Wright brothers. 1968, Apollo 8 was launched. Wow. Wow. We've come a long, long ways. Yeah, just a wee bit. All right, we move on to our next segment. I'm going to ask for the audience to help out. One, two, three. Random Space Facts. Oh, that was nice. That was really good. So the delivery specs on the Curiosity rover, it was engineered to be able to deal with obstacles 65 centimeters, or about 25 inches in height, and to go 200 meters a day. Now we'll see if they actually pull out the stops and hot rod it at some point

and go for those, but it's pretty darn impressive and significantly beyond previous capabilities. Would you like to cover the old trivia contest first? Oh, I guess we should. Go ahead. We asked you, NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, TRMM, celebrated its 15th anniversary in orbit recently. What other space agency is doing that along with NASA? Who's the other agency? How'd we do, Matt? We did great. And it was JAXA, the Japanese space agency. Lots of people

came to us with that. And our winner is going to get one of those great year in space calendars. All right, we move on to questions for the audience. And I will be throwing out at them these fabulous Planetary Society I Have a Place in Space t-shirts. And I have been encouraged not to throw at you, but you will get this very heavy coffee mug from the Crawford Family Forum, where we are. Two big anniversaries yesterday, Friday the 14th. We had one, which was 40 years since the last humans left

the moon. We also had one 50 years ago, a first. What was that first that happened 50 years ago yesterday? DAVID EASTMAN. Way over here on the side. Hi, sir. Was it the first spacecraft to arrive at another planet?

DAVID EASTMAN. Yes, it was. Exactly. Good job. There's Meredith's. DAVID EASTMAN. Let's give him a hand. Mariner 2 completed the first ever successful planetary flyby

and flew by Venus. So I'm going to attempt to throw this T-shirt at you. Have you warmed up? Have you warmed up the arm? No, I'm probably going to hurt it again. But I only do this every three months or so. Oh, no.

It fluttered. It became a parachute on the way there. I'm so sorry to hurt it again, but I only do this every three months or so. Oh, no, it fluttered. It became a parachute on the way there. I'm so sorry. Thank you all for participating. Congratulations. All right, we move on. What was the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity landing site? What was it named?

For whom was that landing site named? Ray Bradbury. Bradbury Landing. That is correct. Bradbury Landing Site. Bravo. Okay, you ready for your shirt? Here it comes.

Oh, almost, almost. What my problem is today. I pride myself on this T-shirt. You know, it's because they're not planetary radio T-shirts. It's true. They don't have the same aerodynamics. Different mass. Yeah.

Okay. What did Mars Science Laboratory launch on? What rocket? Atlas 6. It was an atlas, and they had hoped for Atlas 6, but they hadn't invented that yet. Let me say that's close enough. It was an Atlas 5.

Bravo. All right. Are you ready? Stand up. Stand up so you can catch this. Here it comes. Here we go. A complete failure.

Next time we're bringing planetary radio t-shirts. You are 0 for 4. This is ridiculous. You know, I heard there was an NFL scout in the audience, and I couldn't handle the pressure. So wherever you are, I swear I could do better. You slammed the landing ellipse. Exactly. I hit the landing ellipse.

Thank you, Bill. Good assist. All right. The trivia contest for our home listeners. Do not shout out the answer, those of you in the audience, but you can go to planetary.org slash radio to find out how to enter. On Curiosity, the REMS instrument, the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, basically a meteorological package, a weather station, from what country did it come?

Where are the investigators that lead that instrument? What country are they from? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. And you have until Monday, December 24th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. All right, we're done. All right, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky and think about hedgehogs. Thank you. He's Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, and he joins me each week for What's Up. We are going to close out with another song from our special musical guest, Hedgehog Swing.

They are Luca Pino on guitar, Gage Hulsey on the other guitar, Kelly Stiles on that swinging clarinet, and Benj Clark on bass. Again, you can find them on their Facebook page. Just search there for Hedgehog Swing. I will be back next week with the second half of our conversation about the Curiosity rover. We've got the complete webcast of today's show at planetary.org.

Thanks for watching and listening. Clear skies, everyone. Thank you, everyone. Thanks for watching and listening. Clear skies, everyone. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by members of the Planetary Society. We thank Southern California Public Radio for hosting us in the Crawford Family Forum.

Thank Southern California Public Radio for hosting us in the Crawford Family Forum. We had production support from SCPR's Janice Wachee-Hurst, Jason Georges, Dave McKeever, and Jenny Smith. SCPR's Executive Coordinator of Community Events and the Crawford Family Forum is John Cohn. I'm Laura Kaplan Nieto. Thank you. applause