Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live: MAVEN Arrives at Mars!

Episode Date: September 23, 2014

The latest guest of the Red Planet arrived in orbit on the evening of September 22, 2014. Planetary Radio Live was watching with fingers crossed in Pasadena, California.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Music Maven Reaches Mars on Planetary Radio Live Music Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, ready to present a few highlights from our exciting live show on the eveningary Society, ready to present a few highlights from our exciting live show on the evening of Sunday, September 21st. Joining me on stage were our faithful Planetary Society regulars, Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla and Director of Science and Technology, Bruce

Betts. Later, you'll hear a portion of our live conversation with Bill Nye the Science Guy, courtesy of his iPhone, and in a few moments you'll meet Rich Zurek of JPL. Here's how the show began at the Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena, California. Welcome to another edition of Planetary Radio Live. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We are here to celebrate the arrival of a human-made emissary at another world. In less than an hour and a half, MAVEN will go into orbit around Mars if one last critical firing of its rocket engine goes exactly as planned. We'll turn to NASA TV in less than an hour for its coverage of that burn.

Till then, we've got three terrific guests of our own who will be talking about how this spacecraft will unveil more closely held secrets of the red planet. We'll also examine our ever-expanding knowledge of Mars, with most of that knowledge gained through the robots that we've sent there. through the robots that we've sent there. Dr. Richard Zurek is chief scientist for the Mars Program Office at the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he has worked for 38 years. He's also the longtime project scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, still circling Mars with the sharpest eye in that sky after eight and a half very revealing years. Rich studies the upper atmospheres of both Earth and Mars,

so you shouldn't be too surprised to learn that he's on the MAVEN science team as well. Please welcome back to Planetary Radio, Rich Zurek. Thanks very much for joining us this evening. Happy to be here. I noticed in your bio that you once worked a long time ago for another lab that is largely responsible for this newest arrival at Mars. Yes, after I got my degree in atmospheric science, I was at the University of Colorado, their laboratory for atmospheric and space physics. That organization will be operating the science data and analyzing that data from the MAVEN spacecraft. Bruce Dukosky, the PI of this mission, is at LASP.

The PI, as we've heard many times about other missions, that's really the go-to person for a mission, right? Particularly on these Mars scout missions. This was the second mission selected like this, the Phoenix mission being the first. The PI, science guy, is in charge of those small missions. And yet, it's a very long and complicated process to get there. Bruce was thinking about his proposal

more than a decade ago. What is your role in this mission, as if you didn't have enough other stuff to do? Well, there are eight science instruments that are on board MAVEN. But there was a group of us who wanted to try something that we had tried with previous missions when they were aerobraking at Mars, flying the spacecraft into the atmosphere. When you do that, the atmosphere slows down the spacecraft, and you can get an estimate of how thick that atmosphere is. We're going to do that, the atmosphere slows down the spacecraft, and you can get an estimate

of how thick that atmosphere is. We're going to do that on MAVEN. We're going to use the spacecraft as the instrument. As it dips down into the atmosphere, at its closest approach to the planet, then we're going to see what the density is, and we can compare that to the other instruments that are measuring the composition. Since we have started, let's talk a little bit more about MAVEN, this spacecraft which hopefully will be sticking around Mars for quite a while, beginning tonight. It is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission. You knew that had to be an acronym, right? One of those NASA acronyms. I take it the reason that the solar arrays, generally

all other Mars spacecraft have solar arrays that are completely flat. They're in one plane. It's a little hard to tell from this image, but these have a gullwing shape. And I take it there's a reason for that. There is indeed. I said that the spacecraft comes into the atmosphere. It comes down where it's about 90 miles above the surface at its closest approach. It's a very elliptical orbit. It then flies out of the atmosphere, comes back. And once it's in its science orbit, it will do that every four and a half hours.

By having this kind of gullwing shape, when it goes into the atmosphere, it's like keeping it stable. It's like badminton. As it flies, the shuttlecock will keep that design, will keep it stable as it flies through the atmosphere. You claimed, Rich, a few minutes before we started, that you could name every one of those instruments. Tell us what they do. There's a Planetary Radio t-shirt in this for you, if you can do that, right now. Oh my, because I only know the acronyms, but let's try. Okay, you see a couple of names that are called SWEA and SWEA.

That's for looking at the solar wind. Where's the energy that will drive particles, molecules out of the Mars atmosphere? It's coming from the sun, and it comes either as energetic particles or by radiation. And so these instruments are meant to measure that. SUIA is looking at the electrons, and the one with the I in its name is looking at the ions. Now, there are other particles in different energy ranges, and that's the solar energetic particle instrument,

which is down there in the bottom of the spacecraft. You also see that there's at both ends of the solar arrays magnetometers. And that's because we want to see how that solar wind is interacting with that small remnant field of magnetism that is on Mars. As we'll talk about later, that magnetic field, where it was there, how strong it is, and when the global field might have gone away

is critical to understanding what happened to Mars volatiles. Now the other instruments that are on here are also the Langmuir probes, which are also trying to detect energetic particles. They will also be able to detect small dust particles, and that's important because just four weeks after MAVEN gets to Mars, there's a comet that's going to come close by at about 140,000 kilometers. So that's close, 90,000 miles. And this will be a chance for us to understand what that field looks like.

Finally, you notice there's something that sticks down from this spacecraft. That's an articulated pointing platform and it carries three instruments on it. One of them is measuring those ions and molecules that are energetic just because they've absorbed solar ultraviolet radiation. The others are looking, imaging in the ultraviolet at the atmosphere, looking at the composition of the atmosphere including its temperature, mostly in the upper atmosphere but also down into what we would call the middle atmosphere and finally there's something that's looking at the mass of the molecules and such to tell what is in this composition what

kind of molecules are there and how is that distributed over height and they measure it as the spacecraft flies in and then flies out. During five week-long campaigns during the one Earth year of the MAVEN mission, MAVEN will fly even lower, about another 25 kilometers down into the atmosphere, and that will get to the well-mixed part of the atmosphere, and there we'll get a chance to see how things separate as they get to altitude. So there's a brief rundown of all of these, but as I said, my instrument's that whole spacecraft.

Well done. What size shirt do you wear? So if I could interrupt here for a moment, I have a, you may see I'm sitting here with my laptop monitoring Twitter and finding out what's going on with the spacecraft. I see somebody at the Canberra Deep Space Network Station, which is the one in Australia. Gigantic dishes are now listening in on all the spacecraft. It has reported that we've just had the scheduled loss of signal from the MAVEN spacecraft as it switches from its high-gain dish antenna, which does the high-rate transmissions to Earth, to its low-gain antenna. And it has to do that because it's beginning to get ready to turn for the burn to enter Mars orbit.

So it's happening, guys. And this is all automated. This is all sequenced. There are no commands coming from Earth from this, right? Absolutely not. It's all automated because there's a 12-and-a-half-minute delay between us and Mars. So all the time this evening that we say that things are happening right now, they actually already happened 12 minutes ago. And there's nothing we can do about it if we find out that something went wrong. So

just cross your fingers. I was going to go to you next, Emily, because we got another slide here that we can switch to called the mission architecture, which was also saying about this one. Really, it's not much different than you would see from any other mission that's going to Mars. Absolutely. It's a pretty straightforward trip to Mars. You have to just launch from Earth at exactly the right moment that you can get onto this elliptical orbit that when you happen to reach Mars' distance from the sun, lo and behold, Mars is right there. You only get that opportunity about one in every 26 months. And once in a while we have a mission under construction that doesn't quite catch the bus

and it misses, and they have to wait for more than two years in order to get that next opportunity. That most recently happened with Curiosity. But it did not happen with MAVEN. They made their window. They got on the way to Mars, and they do this fairly quick transfer, and the name of the orbit, Hohmann Transfer Orbit. I was looking at Mr. Random Space Fact over here trying to remember it. And it's a pretty straightforward trip. And pretty much all Mars missions

follow the same path, including another one that's going to be arriving in Mars orbit just two days from now. It's called Mars Orbiter Mission. They do abbreviate that to MOM, but I cannot bring myself to call it MOM. So I continue to call it Mars Orbiter Mission. And that is India's first deep space mission, India's first mission beyond Earth orbit. Pretty cool. Let's hear it for India. That was Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Laktawalla,

joined on stage by Bruce Betts and the Jet Propulsion Lab's Rich Zurek. There's much more to come, including Bill Nye and the exact moment when we learned that MAVEN had made it into orbit. This is Planetary Radio. the public like never before. If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org slash SOS to learn how you can become a space advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS. Save our science.

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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. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with just a few minutes from our live coverage on Sunday, September 21st of the MAVEN spacecraft's arrival at Mars. Mars orbital insertion is the operative phrase, I was on stage at the Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena, California, with Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla, Director of Science and Technology Bruce Betts, and from the Jet Propulsion Lab, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Rich Zurek. Rich is also on the science team for MAVEN. We had been talking about curiosity and opportunity, the rovers down on the surface of Mars, when I asked a very basic question.

Why orbiters at all? I mean, there must be people wondering. Obviously, we now know how to put these wonderful spacecraft down with wheels on the planet or in some interesting spot, as Phoenix did up near the Arctic, the Martian Arctic. What can we do from orbit that we can't do from the ground? Well, the first question is, where would you put them? And that's what our orbiters can do. They show us the whole planet.

They show us where the interesting areas are, where we have the highest potential of further scientific discovery on the planet. They also help us understand the hazards that those landers might encounter as they go down onto the surface. The other point is, think about this. Suppose you had just half a dozen samples of the Earth's surface. Would you know the Earth? No. So we have to put these things into context. The landers give us the ground truth, let us know that what we see from orbit is really there. But we do know, because the landers can show us at even greater scale, even finer scale on the planet, that we don't see everything from orbit. So the combination of the two, that's what gives us our biggest strength.

Plus, of course, your wonderful high-rise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter gives us those nice shots of and opportunity, waving up there from the surface, those rovers. They can rove. They can't hide. I just want to quickly mention the other partners in this mission, like the Goddard Space Flight Center. You heard about LASP at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Goddard Space Flight Center manages the mission, getting there anyway, and provided two of the instruments. Lockheed Martin built MAVEN and is responsible for mission operations. Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley provided four more of the instruments. And your place, JPL, is doing the navigation and deep space network, and that Electra telecommunications relay hardware,

which is another big piece of this mission, which is not really about Mars science, right? It's a program where all the missions help out one another, either by finding a landing site that's interesting to go to, and with the Electra package package by relaying data back. So you get a lot more science data if the rover can conserve its power and just send its information a few hundred miles up into space to an orbiter that then can relay it back to the Earth,

a communications satellite at the planet. Rich, I said we would be able to talk, or you'd be able to tell us a little bit about the science behind this mission. Let's do that now. This, you know, still very mysterious history of Mars and how it went from being that warm and wet place to the cold desert that it is today. When Mariner 9 became the first orbiter around another planet, it saw an amazing thing. It saw channels carved on the surface of this planet. It saw things that looked like valley networks. It saw streamlined islands on the floor

of big canyons and such. And what that meant was water must have flowed on the surface of Mars. Where's that water today? If you were to pour liquid water out on the surface today, it either boils away into the atmosphere or it freezes. So the two possibilities sort of expanding on that are it's frozen in the surface or that water has escaped to space. Now, why would that happen? Because it hasn't happened on the Earth, right? We still have our oceans and such. Well, early Mars had a global magnetic field that probably stood off the solar wind,

kept it from sweeping through the atmosphere and removing those molecules from the planet. That global magnetic field, we know it was there because we see parts of the surface that were magnetized by it, and very strongly so, but that was early in the planet's history. strongly so, but that was early in the planet's history. Some point, billions of years ago, that changed. That global magnetic field, for whatever reason, we're still trying to understand that, went away, leaving it and permitting the solar wind to sweep into the atmosphere. And since that time, it's been able to strip away the molecules. Water gets broken up into its component molecules. The hydrogen, being the lightest gas, goes to the top of the atmosphere and is more readily removed.

And so today's result is we see a planet in which the atmosphere is thin, and because it's thin, it's cold, and the water is either there as ice on the surface, as a vapor in the atmosphere, or perhaps in the subsurface as ice again. If these two missions successfully go into orbit around Mars, MAVEN and MOM, then you will have the most active missions at Mars ever at 7. So I hate to say it, I should knock on some wood, but it does seem like the recent record has been so good that maybe, sorry, Rich, that the Mars curse maybe has been broken. Yeah, when you're forcing scientists to start knocking on wood, stop. But, I mean, it's hard.

It's still incredibly hard to get out there, whether you're landing or going into orbit. Yeah, and the long-term history of Mars exploration is a lot of splatters on the surface and a lot of failed missions and orbiters. It's hard. It's really hard. And NASA in particular and ESA with Mars Express have been really impressive in recent opportunities, but it's still an awfully, you know, deep space is hard. And when you start doing things like going into orbit and doing crazy things like intentionally dipping your spacecraft

into the atmosphere to satisfy some crazy scientist, then, you know, you're like, well, maybe it's too easy. We're just putting an orbiter around Mars. We'll do something challenging. Just want to interrupt with a brief update from Mission Control. They now have telemetry indicating that all six of MAVEN's engines are burning as expected, so we're doing well.

That's great. That deserves a hand. We're getting there, and the telemetry is coming pretty quickly, so I'm very hopeful that before we end this evening, we'll actually know what's happening and whether that spacecraft has joined all those sisters in orbit around Mars. We've got a question right here from a young man. Hi, what's your name? Griffin, is there a Aurora on Mars?

Is there a what on Mars? Aurora. Great question. We think there are, but we haven't seen them yet. And part of that is just because our instruments aren't able to look for them at the sensitivity of what's there. We're actually kind of looking ahead here to there's a comet that's flying close by Mars, and it might actually excite auroras that would be stronger and more prevalent than we've seen in the past. Maybe we can detect those. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society.

He'd have been with us in Pasadena on the evening of September 21st, but he had a previous engagement in New York, filling in as guest host of StarTalk for his buddy, Neil deGrasse Tyson. With only a few minutes left before we would learn if MAVEN had achieved Martian orbit, Bill placed a FaceTime call to us in the Crawford Family Forum. And this is another example of a very reasonably priced mission that's going to make discoveries that really are yet unknown. Learning about Mars' past will inform us about the history of the Earth

and the history of the solar system, which for me is part of getting at those two big questions that I'm always fascinated with. Where did we come from? Where did we come from? How did we get here? How old is the solar system? What are we all doing here? And then the next logical question is, are we alone?

What if some remarkable amount of methane is found in the Martian atmosphere? My, oh my. To say nothing of remarkable technological advancements that I bet are in large part responsible for your being able to look into your hand-held device there and talk to us from backstage somewhere in Brooklyn. Yeah, it's remarkable. It shows you that space exploration has led to a global awareness of what I like to call our place in space. And having you all there in Pasadena and me here in New York and we're able to talk about it using my handheld device is really a tribute to the technology that is the result of the human spirit. So thank you all very much for including me. a tribute to really to the technology that is the result of the human spirit so thank you all very much for including me

thank you all for coming to the forum tonight and let's keep our fingers crossed for a successful MAVEN Mars insertion. Thank you so much Bill. Thanks for taking a few minutes to do this. Bill will be back on Planetary

Radio for his regular segment that we do every week. Rich, you have been in this position before. You've actually been there many times. I think in particular of Mars of Connoisseur Orbiter. What kind of stuff is running through your mind as you wait for that magic announcement? Well, you're

just holding your breath because you're waiting to see whether it's all going to work the way you worked for years to have it happen. And some of us have also been veterans of missions for which this didn't happen as we expected. So it's still a dangerous business. It's a harsh environment. You do everything you think of, and then you worry about the things you didn't think of. Finally, and almost at the exact moment when word was expected, all of us in Pasadena who were watching NASA TV coverage on a giant screen heard this announcement.

Based on observed navigation data, congratulations. Maven is out and Mars is over. All right. Okay. Oh, my goodness. Awesome. Wow, that's a thing. You called it.

You called it. There it is. Data doesn't lie. Rich Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has a shiny new neighbor in orbit around Mars. That's right. With MAVEN safely in Mars orbit, I said goodbye to Rich Zurek of JPL and to Emily Lakdawalla. Bruce Betts remained with me on stage to do what he and I do every week. It's time for What's Up, our weekly tour of the night sky

and your chance to win the space trivia contest. Take it, Bruce. Hey, Matt. It's good to see you. Yeah, welcome. So glad you could make it. On to the night sky. We've got Mars, surprisingly enough, is up in the night sky by the way one of those amazing geometry things in the maven coverage we talked about how goldstone was communicating with uh maven for part of that time well that's because we can see mars in the in the

sky so if you go out in the early evening look the southwest, you will see a reddish dot that may be Mars, but it's awfully close to the red star Antares and actually is moving past it over the next week to two weeks. And they are actually similar in appearance. And then over to their right is the yellowish Saturn. In the pre-dawn you got Jupiter over in the east looking super bright. Can't miss it if you happen to be conscious in the pre-dawn, you got Jupiter over in the east looking super bright. Can't miss it if you happen to be conscious in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week. Which Bruce is not usually.

We move on to this week in space history. It's a night thing. I look at things at night. This week in space history, 2007. Been seven years since the Dawn spacecraft was launched. It just had a little bit of a hiccup, but is successfully cruising along towards its second big asteroidal object headed for Ceres this coming year after exploring Vesta. Now, I'd like the audience help on the count of three. One, two, three.

Random Space Path. Very nice. They didn't even get to rehearse that. That was really good. The Maven spacecraft, you may have heard of it. It is about the length from tip to tip of those solar panels, about the length of a school bus. It is about the mass of a fully loaded SUV. That's bigger than I thought.

Well, that's why I throw these facts out for you, man. Give you an idea. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. I asked people, what star has the largest proper motion in the sky? Proper motion being kind of side-to-side motion, angular movement over time relative to the other more distant fixed stars. Our winner, you let us know if he got this right. If he did, it's José Vasconcelos Costa of Natal, Brazil.

He said that the star with the greatest proper motion is Barnard's star. That is correct. It is Barnard's star, which is actually not a naked eye object, but is an easy telescopic object. And it moves its lateral speed. It's sideways relative to our line of sight. Speed is 90 kilometers per second. What this means is 10.3 human lifetime it will move in the sky about a quarter of a degree, which is about half the angular diameter of the full moon.

So compared to all those other stars that are really far away and not moving much, it's a mover and a shaker, but it's not like you would notice too obviously. Jose, congratulations. We're going to send you that lovely Planetary Radio t-shirt, which I saw a couple of people wearing here this evening. They're stylish. As a matter of fact, yeah. Stephen Coulter, another regular who's down in Australia, one of our Down Under listeners,

he said that because of this motion, in approximately 10,000 years, Barnard's Star will be at approximately the same distance as the Alpha Centauri system. So can we surmise from that that Barnard Starr is rushing to be our closest neighbor? Barnard is actually the B in BFF. Little known fact. We got a bunch of nicknames for Barnard Starr, too. Well, sure. Why wouldn't you? But apparently these are legit.

Magdalena Kritsch of Poland and Dan Campbell in Georgia, among others, told us it's also known as the Arrow, the Runaway Star. I like this one. The Greyhound of the Skies. You have a question for the listeners at

home for next week. Alright, so for the listeners, no yelling out the answer. How many orbiters has NASA sent or tried to send to Mars? So successful or unsuccessful? How many were successful? How many successfully achieved orbit in working condition? And how many total were sent? All right, go to planetary.org slash radio contest to get us your entry. By when, Matt? By the 30th of September, Tuesday the 30th, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to enter this contest and win yourself one of those version 2.1 Planetary Radio t-shirts.

Bruce, I think we're done. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about exit signs that lead you to your destination. Thank you, and good night. And that is a sure sign that we have reached the end of the What's Up segment with the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts. And that closes our presentation of highlights from planetary radio Live coverage of MAVEN's arrival at Mars.

I'll be back next week with Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, chair of the House Space, Science and Technology Committee. As I record this week's show, there are still tickets available for Planetary Radio Live's celebration of the Canadian Space Program on Wednesday, October 1st, at the University of Toronto. Details about the live show and webcast are at planetary.org. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by those Mars-loving members of the Society. Clear skies. Thank you.