Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - PLANETARY RADIO LIVE: Special Curiosity Report Continues

Episode Date: December 24, 2012

Our fascinating, live conversation with Curiosity Project Manager Richard Cook and Project Scientist John Grotzinger continues. Richard and John are joined on stage by Bill Nye the Science Guy, Emily Lakdawalla and Mat Kaplan.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Music More Planetary Radio Live with the leaders of the Curiosity Rover mission on Mars. Music Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We've got more of our special holiday present for you as project manager Richard Cook and project scientist John Grotzinger tell us about Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover.

We began the conversation last week at Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum. Our in-person and live webcast audiences saw Bill Nye the Science Guy and senior editor Emily Lakdawalla join me on stage with Richard and John. By the way, you can enjoy the entire archived webcast at planetary.org. It includes great tunes from our musical guest, Hedgehog Swing. Our regular What's Up visit with Bruce Betts is also ahead. Okay, let's pick up the conversation back on Saturday, December 15.

Bill Nye has just mentioned the sand trap that stopped Mars Exploration Rover Spirit in her tracks. If Curiosity were in that same sand, would it be able to get out? Yeah, because actually Spirit would be if it were a hole. Okay, if it had the last motor going. Spirit, because it had the motor problems with it, I think contributed to it getting stuck. In this case, because the vehicle is a lot bigger, it would be able to get out more easily. Also, we hope with the software capabilities that Spirit and Opportunity demonstrated, we'll avoid getting into those kind of traps.

How does that work? It's kind of an interesting thing because when we first started building rovers on mars we you know we just would look out and look for hazards and avoid them by doing the visual uh you know the the terrain avoidance kinds of things in the software on board one of the things though that when you when that we do when we're driving there over usually is we just count how far we're going by measuring the wheel turns you know which we measure. The computer can monitor how many wheel turns it's making. The problem is that if you're digging into sand, you can be turning the wheels and not moving. And so that's one of the reasons why we had that problem is that the wheel basically was turning

and the rover didn't know it was moving. And so what we do now is a trick that you might do here on the earth if you were in that situation, which is you would stare at something on the horizon and watch it as you're driving along. And if it's moving, then you're moving. And if it's not moving and you think you're moving, then you're digging yourself into the ground. And so that terrain sort of tracking capability is a capability that Spirit demonstrated and Opportunity demonstrated, and now we're going to use on Curiosity. Emily? You know, Richard, I think that engineers think that terrain is a problem,

and geologists think that terrain is what we're there for. That's the creative tension. And so one of the reasons that I love geology so much is because when you study it, you get this kind of X-ray or history vision where you can look at a desert that looks totally lifeless, and you can imagine what it was like when those rocks were forming, and you can see at a desert that looks totally lifeless and you can imagine what it was like when those rocks were forming and you can see a completely different world. So since you are a professional geologist, can you tell us a little bit about what you see when you look at these rocks in this environment on this modern Mars? What was Mars like before? Yeah, that's really,

I think that's the most fun for me personally. At the end of the day, Curiosity is sort of a time machine that takes you backwards and you get a sense for what the planet may have been doing billions of years ago. That was the really cool thing about the conglomerate discovery. Richard's right. What's the conglomerate discovery? I'll come back to that in a minute. But, you know, you're driving along, and the thing is that is that driving is relatively easy in this mission, because we know how to do it well. Now, putting the arm out, doing all the chemistry is what takes a lot of time this time, because we haven't done it before.

But the conglomerate is a gravel. It's an ancient gravel that got cemented together, the pebbles that Emily showed. And, you know, what's cool about that is you don't have to be even a scientist to appreciate what it is. You look at rounded pebbles and everybody's seen them, and it's kind of Mars for the common person. And that was nice to get in the bag early on. But what you do is that when you see it as a scientist, you realize, okay, with a little bit of calculation, you can get at the ankle-to-waist-deep thing. And then you can sort of look at it, the landscape, and realize, you know, it's pretty flat here, so that water was probably flowing across a very broad area.

And that's what's cool about doing the history part. John, you might have guessed that somebody would bring this up, so I'll go ahead and bring it up. A few weeks ago, you had NPR reporter Joe Palka, yeah, he knows, sitting across the desk from you. He couldn't see your computer screen. And that became a very big deal, which I know you said you responded. In fact, we had it on the radio show a couple of weeks ago at a press conference at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union. You said, I guess I have to be more careful about what I say, because a lot of people got very excited. have to be more careful about what I say because a lot of people got very excited. But really, this was something for the history books because it had everything to do with this incredibly

complex device. Yeah, you know, that was a real interesting event in my life. You know, you tell your kids, and I've always sort of believed in this myself, you know, you do what you love, love what you do, and don't promise more than you can deliver. And yet you're suddenly in a situation where it seems like no matter what we do with the spacecraft now, we are never going to match up to the expectation of little green men on Mars. And so then you wonder, how do you deconstruct this and build up again?

And there are some important messages about the mission, but the thing to me that was the good in it, it took me several days to see this, but is how much interest this mission generates. Oh, man, people are going crazy. It's people, and we should be grateful for that because that's what underwrites it all at the end of the day. Well, I mean, you can say grateful,

but you guys are producing a remarkable product. By the way, speaking of expectations, we were there on the night of Sunday the 5th here on the west, on the Monday the 6th back east. And you guys, well, it'll be a day or day and a half before we get an image down. You know, don't worry about it. We'll be land. We'll have some data that that verify that we were on the surface. It was at seven minutes, and then there was that thumbnail picture. Wow, the crowd, if I

may, went wild. Richard? Well, yeah, I mean, we don't really know. And so we always try to, I mean, that's a little bit in the under-promising and over-delivering category. That whole episode, it kind of made me realize that the public doesn't really understand yet the difference between data and discoveries. And with a lot of the time in space science, they are the same because you're flying past something that you've never seen before. And lo and behold, it's a new world and it's different from anything else. And the data is the discovery.

But with this rover, it's very much not. It takes a long time to get to the discoveries. And can you talk about what you have to do in order to get from the data to the science? Yeah, that's a good way to put it with a sort of a flyby spacecraft, because every picture is a discovery. You're seeing a view that no human being has ever seen before. So it's just, it's very straightforward. But when you've got a mass spectrometer that you're trying to look at complex molecules, the basis for that kind of discovery is you make a first observation, you make sure the instrument gives back the data that it should be giving you, and then you do it over again.

And when you repeat this very, very complex measurement that could go wrong for so many different ways and you see that it actually worked again, and you basically got the same thing, that was kind of what I was getting into at that fateful moment there. But that's a hard thing to do. I think it's the difference. I mean, when the questions get hard, right, then the interpretation gets even harder, right? And it's a good thing that we're in that phase of exploring the surface of Mars. I mean, we're not in the phase where we're just like, hey, it's worth something new that we've never seen before with the first vehicles we've landed. We're now doing, I think John is an

example of that, science, which is really challenging and really pushing not just what we can do on Mars, but even here on the Earth. And it's challenging to explain to the public. It absolutely is. Hey, so were you under any pressure? I remember in the disco era when the Viking mission had what would nominally be a test for organic molecules. And this is what Carl Sagan was very excited about this. And there was, if I may, some bubbling up. Was there any pressure to not make the same mistake that was made in 1976? I mean, well, definitely.

We try to learn from the lessons of that. And I think that certainly like Gentry Lee, for example, who is a big participant in Viking, is still around advising us on things, knows very well what the challenges were. And so I think we have tried to learn from that. knows very well what the challenges were. And so I think we have tried to learn from that. It's interesting, though, that because it's been 40 years almost, that we're learning again how to do things like sampling and the contamination control and all of the challenges that make these missions difficult. It's not something that you remember unless you do it.

And so we're learning for the first time in a way. I want to pick up on Bill's question of what's next. And so we're learning for the first time in a way. I want to pick up on Bill's question of what's next. Almost everything now, John, right, I think has been tested out and has worked more than once exactly the way they should. We have one big event that's still left, and it may be the biggest of all, which is actually drilling into a rock. So we've got a drill that goes down about 5 centimeters,

and we're going to pick a rock, and we're kind of hoping to do it maybe before the holidays start, but we're not really sure. And if that happens, then we'll go up to the rock after the holidays and get ready to drill it. That will probably take another month or two. It will be a while. Richard, what's the status of the rover, and does it look like we're going to get a full couple of years off of the warranty on this thing?

Well, I mean, you never can tell on the surface of Mars, but we definitely believe that the vehicle is working great. No signs it's working in terms of its engineering, the thermal performance, temperature behavior, everything very, very well. And so there's nothing we'll use to indicate that there's going to be a concern long term. I think normally with these sorts of rovers, once we over-design them so much to get them there at all and to make them work at all, that once they're there, I think it'll work for a long time. Yeah, look at spirit and opportunity. Not bad. Okay, now I heard a rumor that there were problems with the drill on some version, test version of the rover. It caused all kinds of electrical problems. Is that a rumor? We did have a, yeah, well, no, it version of the rover. It caused all kinds of electrical problems. Is that a rumor?

We did have a, yeah, well, no, it wasn't a rumor. We actually had a problem before launch with the drill. The drill is a hammer drill, and it means it's got, you use like a percuss mechanism that's a voice coil in it, and when that voice coil, if it shorts out, it could have caused problems with the electronics. We actually made some changes in the electronics a few months before launch, and we made changes in the software after that so that it would use this protection

and keep the drill from causing any concerns. But it is a possibility that over the long lifetime of the drill that this percuss mechanism will stop working, but the vehicle can work even without that. It's an ongoing process, as we've seen with so many spacecraft, that they get repaired while they're doing the job and we can't touch them. That's right. Hi, sir. Tell us your name. Kurt Alexander. The power source, I think is a nuclear battery if I read it right. When you compare the Voyagers, which were launched in the 70s, is it possible the QA could last

30 years? And Richard, tell us a little bit about that RTG, that power source. Yeah, the RTG, the radioisotope thermoelectric generator, if you want to know what that stands for, is a technology we've used on previous missions, including on Viking. The Viking landers both had RTGs on them. And so it's something that we have experience with. The one difference between where we're using it on Mars versus deep space, for example, Voyager, is much colder in space.

And these RTGs, although it is very cold on the surface of Mars, it's not nearly as cold, they actually degrade slowly over time, not just because the plutonium is decaying, but also because the thermoelectric converters also decay. And so we actually do expect over time to see the performance of that or the amount of power we get out of it drop. It will drop faster than Voyager. Having said all that, it's not going to decay anytime soon. It's

going to be 10 years or more that it will still produce power at a pretty good amount. And so, yes, we are being conservative in saying two years. There's no real sort of consumable, nothing that the vehicle is using up, in a sense, as it operates. And so I think unless we decide that we want to, you know, we don't take care of it, right, basically, I think it'll last for quite a long time. I've heard the number 14 years talked about the RTG. Yeah, we'll see. I keep telling my children they might come and work at OMID someday, and so we'll see. It may be a little too early in the mission to have lessons learned on this arm, but I know that you guys learned a lot from the experience on the Phoenix mission.

They had some challenges to deal with that you've dealt with. Right. That's more in the case of sample acquisition and processing, and we definitely did learn lessons from Phoenix. You know, we talk about entry, descent, and landing as being the seven minutes of terror or whatever. One of the reasons why it is is because it's us, the vehicle, having to fly into this relatively unknown atmosphere. I mean, it's a place we know more about it, but not as much as certainly here on the Earth. The same thing is true of driving, and the same thing is true of sample acquisition.

We are interacting with Mars. The rover is now working very closely with a terrain and with a material that we've never experienced before. And so we're guessing what it's going to be like when we build these vehicles. When we get to Mars, we learn a lot. And when the first time we used an arm on Viking, we learned the same thing on Phoenix. And we're learning again on this mission as well. John, NASA just a few weeks ago announced another big mission, a rover. And they said that it'll be based on this now, well, still proving itself, but I'd say pretty well proven platform that Curiosity is using.

I mean, it's not been universally embraced by the science community, but I wonder what you think of this. Is he doing this once again in a few years, 2020? And also, what that mission should really be about? Well, you know, what Richard said a minute ago about standing on the shoulders of giants is true, and we hope that that mission will leverage what we're learning and the architecture that we deployed. And by accepting some things as sort of print to build, like the EDL system, the landing system, and the rover system, you can sort of build on that and go from there. I think what's controversial is the amount of money that was allocated. Are you going to get what the decadal survey asked you to get in terms of the science community? But my feeling

about it is that as long as it goes ahead, you're going to learn something about some part of Mars that you didn't know before. To me, the serendipitous nature of geologic discovery almost always guarantees if you go to some other place, you're going to find something you never anticipated. If you get everything, all the science that you could possibly hope for out of curiosity, and maybe more, would you still be saying, nope, we need to bring a piece of that planet back here, sample return? I always think bringing a piece back is a great objective because you're just going to be able to tear it apart in more detail no matter where it comes from. But if you must compromise, then the planet is diverse. And what we learned from the landing site selection going into MSL was that there are three, four places that kind of define end members of Mars.

And if we wind up exploring another one of those, we're going to be richer for it. Well, the 2020 mission, which was recently announced, had, Emily, you can back me up on this, had no science specified. And just for those of you who don't know, there's this thing where the Mars community gets together and created a document called the Decadal Survey. Not just the Mars community, but the entire planet.

The entire, there you go, yeah. Wanted to get, what information do you want to do? Female Speaker 1 Not just the Mars community, but the entire planetary. Male Speaker 1 The entire, there you go, yeah. Female Speaker 1 Yeah. Male Speaker 1 Wanted to get, what information do you want over the next 10 years? And so I just, as CEO of the Planetary Society, a couple concerns. First of all, science is why we do these things, to answer the deep questions. Where do we come from and are we alone? And that will probably, if it's only 2012 going on 2013, we should be able to shake the science out in the next five years. But we also, Mars is cool, and I'm kooky for Mars.

Who doesn't love Mars? But there are oceans elsewhere in the solar system, Europa, Enceladus. We want to not let go of those. We want to keep reaching farther out into the solar system. And Ganymede. Everybody always forgets Ganymede. Ganymede's got an ocean tip. Prepare to the gods. Emily can recite all of the round objects for you, and we'll do it when we finish the show.

She knows everyone in the solar system. And, of course, the lovely thing would be if we didn't have to choose between Mars and Europa, but if we could actually go to both of them. John, Richard, you're smiling and nodding. It sounds like you're in agreement. Absolutely. It would be great.

I mean, going to Europa would be a great mission. It would be not just the science but the exploration of going to a place we haven't seen up close. It would be wonderful. Going to Titan. It's sort of the new Mars. Mars has got to be the new early Earth. Titan is the new Mars. Mars has got to be the new early Earth. Titan is the new Mars.

I like that. Actually, I know a Titan scientist who sometimes describes Titan as the most Earth-like world in the solar system, and people take him to task for that. So instead, he says that Titan is the, no, let me get this, Earth is the second most Mars-like object in the solar system. That's pretty good. Great line. Richard, John, we're about out of time. What do you want to see next?

What is next and what do you most want to see from this amazing rover? John? Well, you know, I'm anxious to get through the drilling and discover what we're going to discover in the Glenelg area and then get on the trek to Mount Sharp. I think at this point probably we're looking, if we were really optimistic about it, we could get there still within 2013. Richard?

To me, there's the picture that's called the promised land, which is of the area in the foothills of Mount Sharp where we're going to go. That's where I want to see the rover, just to see the view of, I mean, I would love to see the rover there from where we are now because it will be amazing to see it in amongst that topography. One of the appeals of these type of missions is that they're human scale, right, that people understand it because they think it's like going to Zion or going to someplace here on the earth, places like that where you can see this sort of terrain.

And I think when we get up close and we're going to see those buttes from 150 meters away or 100 meters away, people are going to be amazed. John and Richard, thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio Live. And here's hoping for many years of discovery on the surface of Mars. John Gratzinger is project scientist, and Richard Cook is project manager for Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. Bill Nye is chief executive officer of the Planetary Society, where Emily Lakawala is a senior editor and our planetary evangelist. Please join me. One more round of

applause for all of our guests. Planetary Radio Live at the Crawford Family Forum on Saturday, December 15th. What's up with Bruce Betts and a great tune from Hedgehog Swinger just ahead. 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 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.

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. Hey Bruce, happy new Mayan calendar cycle. Happy new Mayan calendar cycle to you too. Easy for you to say. Not really. Anyway. Do they have cards for that? Not yet, but they should. I didn't want to invest heavily just in case. Let me just say it's good to be here. And it's good to be with you. And since we are here,

we should keep looking up in the night sky. Check out Jupiter in the evening over to the east. And when you check out Jupiter, super bright over there, look near it for a much dimmer but still bright reddish star. That's Aldebaran. And then farther away towards the north, towards the left when I'm looking in the evening, there's a very bright star that really does not get enough respect, I think. Capella. Capella is the sixth brightest star in the sky and the third brightest in the

northern hemisphere so it is a a bright star not nearly as bright as fabulous Jupiter though so check out that as your evening uh star finding assignment in the pre-dawn uh you can still catch Venus low low in the east but super bright that, easy to see, but much dimmer yellowish Saturn. Oh, and we've got a meteor shower coming up. I should love you. Another one? Yeah, it's not as cool on average as the Geminids, but it's really not a bad one. This one doesn't get respect just because it's so hard to pronounce.

And people laugh at me. Go for it. Quantrantids. Oh, yes, the Quantrantids. The Quadrantids. Okay. The Quadis. I think we'll yes, the quadrantids. The quadrantids. Okay. The quadis. I think we'll call them the quadis.

And the quadis peak on January 3rd and 4th, and on average they have about 40 meteors per hour from a dark site. There will be a little bit of moon interference, but you can still check it out. So kind of from a couple days before that to a couple days after, you can check those out. And also, if you get this right when it comes out, check out on the 25th of December in the evening. Jupiter is very close to the moon, making yet another thing going on over there in the east. We move on to this week in space history. It was this week in 1968 that Apollo 8 entered lunar orbit. Yeah, and somewhat unexpectedly, because the lunar module wasn't ready yet. So those guys got to spin around the moon.

But they knew they weren't landing. They knew they weren't landing, yeah. It wasn't like a phone call. Hey, guys. I suppose they could have, with a little adjustment, done a Grail-type landing. That was an unpleasant thought. Yeah. Thank you for that.

Congratulations. The Grail mission, for their successful mission, just ended with an intentional slamming into the moon. Bang, bang. Without humans. Random space fact. Oh, what a nice holiday version. Thank you. You're welcome.

So they're not talked about much, but Martian months, if one were to define months based upon a Earth-type analogy, people define them as spanning 30 degrees in solar longitude. So one twelfth of the distance going around the sun in terms of angle. But what's interesting, we often forget how eccentric the Mars orbit is, but this gives a nice feeling for it because it goes much, the Mars is moving faster when it's closer to the Sun, slower farther out. Months vary from 46 to 67 sols in length, sol being a Martian day. That really is much more eccentric than I thought. Yes, it's very much like us. Mr. Kepler, you'd be so proud. I'm sure you would. So we move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, what is the most common graphical symbol for Neptune designed to look like? How'd

we do, Matt? So I'm not going to identify the listener who said a fork, though that's technically accurate. I also heard a pitchfork. These are not the answers we were looking for, but I suppose they are also somewhat valid. We had a surprisingly strong response for this, more than I would have expected. People were just kind of turned on by this thing.

Let me tell you, I'm very, very proud to say who our winner is. And this was, I swear, chosen by random.org. But I'm especially pleased. It's you, isn't it? No, it's not. But next best thing, it's Daryl Gardner. Daryl Gardner, I think a first-time winner from Lake Stevens, Washington. Daryl said it's a trident.

That is correct. That big fork object. It is a trident like the mythological Neptune. Yeah. Now, why am I so happy it's Daryl? Why are you, Matt? Because Daryl added to his note, awesome Marvin the Martian voice, Matt. That made my day.

I'm sure that made your day. I am so pleased. If I didn't know you better, I would question random.org. But I'm sure knowing you, it was legitimate. It was destiny. Speaking of Capella, how many stars make up the Capella system? What we call the naked eye star Capella is actually more than one star. How many is it? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. Guess what? You have until the last day of the year, December 31st at 2 p.m.

Pacific time to get us this answer. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about your favorite writing implement. Thank you, and good night. All right, so you can't write with this, but here's a present for you. Oh, you're so nice. In a little JPL bag. You're so ahead of me. You went to JPL again?

Well, quite a while ago. I forgot to give this to you a long time ago. Ew, it's mushy. Oh, it's a JPL again? Well, quite a while ago. I forgot to give this to you a long time ago. Ew, it's mushy. Oh, it's a JPL rubbery thing. Coin purse thing. It's a coin man bag thing. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Listen, you can hear it.

That's what it sounds without coins in it. Thank you, Matt. It says JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, and it's red. And here's some pennies to go with it. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects. Money, money. There you go.

He accidentally gave me a dime. Oh, I thought they were pennies. I thought it was four pennies. No, no, no. All right, you owe me. What was I saying? Yes, he's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Join us next week for a special year-end review with Bruce Betts, Casey Dreyer, Emily Lakdawalla, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation,

and by the always forward-looking members of the Planetary Society. Live long and prosper with Jazz Quartet, Hedgehog Swing. Thank you.