Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Remembering Neil Armstrong/ChemCam is Zapping Martian Rocks!

Episode Date: August 27, 2012

Emily Lakdawalla and Bill Nye the Science Guy join Mat Kaplan for a special remembrance of Neil Armstrong. Then we visit with the principal investigator for the first ray gun on Mars. Roger Wiens leads the ChemCam team that is using its powerful laser to zap and analyze Martian rocks. It’s just one of the Curiosity Rover success stories. Win a ChemCam bumper sticker and a Planetary Radio t-shirt in the weekly What’s Up space 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.

Remembering Neil and a ray gun on Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Rest in peace, Neil Armstrong, one of the first two humans to set foot on another world. I'll talk about his legacy with Emily Lakdawalla and Bill Nye in a moment. By the way, my What's Up conversation with Bruce Betts later today was recorded shortly before we learned of Neil's passing. We'll also talk with Roger Wiens, principal investigator for ChemCam on Curiosity, the Mars science laboratory rover.

The powerful laser-based instrument is zapping rocks and gathering great data on the red planet. Here are Emily and Bill. Folks, thank you for joining me for this little special approach here and giving up your regular segment so that we can pay tribute to this true hero, the first man to walk on the moon. Bill, I know you are old enough, like me, to actually remember watching this moment. Oh, yeah, I was on my knees in the family living room

to try to get as close as possible to the black-and-white television. And the images, if you look at them even now, are quite blurry. But it had this sense. I mean, I was a kid. Images, if you look at them even now, are quite blurry. But it had this sense. I mean, I was a kid. There was this intense optimism in those days. And we had this sense that, well, of course he's going to pull it off. Of course it's going to work well.

And when he uttered his words, one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind, everybody was relieved. Okay, we got that over with. Now, let's see. What's it like on the moon? Let's see what it's like. Emily, you are part of the following generation. You don't have the direct memory of this. You know it certainly by reputation, though. What has always been your impression of this historic time in human history? Well, you know, I have to say that I didn't really appreciate how historic and important and world-changing it was until I became an adult. When I was a kid, this was something that happened when pictures were in black and white. And so it was in that long-ago

history that didn't seem to have bearing on what I was doing today. Now I understand just how amazing an accomplishment it was, how difficult, how fast, and how much the humans really were in control of what was going on there. These were not robotic spacecraft. These were humans using tools to land on another planet. And now I understand how amazing that was. But I didn't really come to appreciate that until recently. And Bill, apparently this was a human who was particularly well suited for this kind of challenge. Yeah, well, I mean, everybody forgets, well, maybe not. I mean, he was a test pilot. And the reason they hired test pilots for these jobs back then is, there's just this thing where you might be spinning upside down, it's very athletic. And yet it's also engineering or

systems, systems engineering. You have a series of block diagrams and you have to look at critical paths and what system is most likely to work or most likely to fail. Meanwhile, you're being thrown around trying to make yourself sick. And so these people really had to keep their heads. This is the guy that flew the X-15 and bounced off the atmosphere. And he had to circle back and forth apparently all over the state of california to land he uh hooked up with the athena rocket booster it started to tumble you and i would have just been throwing up our eyes would have come flying out of our skulls but he kept his head and got the thing back under control then he landed the

lunar research vehicle lunar landing research, this like giant metal insect essentially blew up under him. And he parachuted down and he went in, filled out the paperwork, giant metal thing blew up. I almost got killed, your friend Neil. And so he was really a fantastic pilot. And that's why he got that gig. The right stuff. Emily, what'd you think about the way the rest of his life went, how he lived his life? I mean, he wasn't a recluse, as some people like to think of him, but he didn't generally talk to, you know, people like me who wanted to record him. I think that he's a role model for behaving like that because he understood his unique place in history. He was certainly a pivotal person at a pivotal moment. But his job was to do something that would open up the world for other people to follow him and do the kinds of things that he did.

And too much focus on what the one thing that he did that made him so famous is it's looking back. It's not looking forward. one thing that he did that made him so famous is it's looking back. It's not looking forward. And I think he was probably frustrated by too much looking back at history and not enough understanding what his accomplishments opened up for the rest of humanity to do after him. And I think that's one of the most wonderful things about him. For many of us of my age, this was a high point technologically that for whatever reason, spiritually, the United States has not gotten back to that place. I mean, after this came the Ford Pinto, the Chevy Vega, disco clothes, the president being impeached, getting involved in another

couple of wars. I mean, it's different now. I mean, now we have iPhones and the Internet, and we do this interview electronically. But it's a different time now. I wonder what your perception is. Well, I think that he certainly opened up the possibility for us to imagine humans in space. Looking back on what he accomplished, it is pretty amazing, but it was also at a time where if I had been a kid at that time,

I would not have been able to imagine following his footsteps because I was a girl. And at the time, there were nothing but men and white men doing these things. And so, I feel very fortunate to be in a generation where as a girl, I can imagine actually following in the footsteps of people who accomplish great things. Now, today, it's difficult to imagine going to the moon because we haven't yet managed to repeat the accomplishments of not just Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins, but the people who sent them there, the thousands or tens of thousands of people who had to work together on this massive project. Those kinds of massive projects, I think that they created a great deal of innovation. They created a lot of national pride. And I feel like we are lacking something that we can be proud of,

something positive that we can be proud of, that we can all drive together to accomplish. And I hope that as a nation we come up with something like that, that we can do in the future, and that this time women and minorities will be allowed to participate. Is this somebody worthy of veneration for the rest of history? Well, sure. I mean, he's a historic figure.

So is Charles Lindbergh and Thomas Edison. He did a fantastic job at the perfect time in history, and he changed the world. He changed what everybody in societies everywhere expects. As humans, we can accomplish great things. And he was the tip of that spear. I mean, this is an extraordinary time right now. The Curiosity rover just landed on Mars, and it's just the beginning. It may find evidence of life. I don't think we would have had that mission, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity mission, without Neil Armstrong or the next test pilot doing his job. I mean, he changed the world.

It's a fantastic thing. It's a historic, historic time. Emily Lactewal is the Planetary Society Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society, as well as being the science guy, and we will talk with them again next week. Coming up next, though, another pioneer, or at least a pioneering instrument. Roger Wiens will join us. He is the principal investigator for ChemCam on the Curiosity rover.

Coronation. That's the name given to the first rock to be zapped by the first ray gun on Mars, as far as we know. Fortunately, this laser has come in peace in search of knowledge, and it is already telling us more about that increasingly familiar planet. Planetary scientist Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory is the very happy principal investigator for ChemCam. Roger, I can only try to tell you how thrilled I am that you have taken time out from zapping rocks to drive over here to the Planetary Society. Thanks for joining us on Planetary Radio. It's my pleasure, Matt. So how's it going? I guess you've moved on from coronation.

You're zapping other rocks nowadays? Yeah, well, just in the mission in general, I would just say this is absolutely fabulous. To me, it's unbelievable just how well the mission is going, the fact that it landed safely, being a big one, and then getting all the instruments unpacked, so to speak. We're partway through that, but it's going great so far.

Well, you know, you had well over 3,000 of us at Planet Fest a few weeks ago at the Pasadena Center who were maybe not quite as ecstatic as those people we were watching in the webcast or you scientists were to know that your instruments were down on the surface of Mars? Yeah, it was a pretty deafening roar in the science room, too. And I hear you've had, what, a champagne celebration following this first zapping of this rock coronation? That's right. Over the weekend last week, so a little over a week ago, from when you're hearing this, we celebrated our first shots on Mars,

the first time a laser this powerful has been on Mars and shooting at rocks to get their composition. So when we reported that in the SOG, we brought some champagne. We've had the best time for more than a year out of this place, and, of course, we're not alone, talking about how, you know, finally Earthlings have sent a ray gun to Mars. And we're going to continue to make that joke, so please, you know, forgive us. Yeah, I've seen something about an unprovoked attack, but let's ignore that. Let's talk about the real results. You got, I saw on the press conference a few days before our conversation here today, this terrific graph that you had that shows us ChemCam is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Oh yeah, I mean we got the first spectrum and I mean in some ways it was unbelievable

how much it looked like in our lab. You know, it's just, there's nothing wrong and there was nothing unusual about the way the instrument was working, except actually we were getting a little more signal than we were expecting, and we actually slightly saturated one peak, and that's not a real issue. More signal is always a nice thing. So, yeah, it was exciting to see this thing come out so clearly. And you've already had some results, I guess, that have raised some eyebrows. And I'm thinking in particular of your comment about this finding of, what, hydrogen and magnesium?

Was that unexpected? We didn't know what to expect exactly on the surface of rocks and so on. As I did mention there, we've seen this on everything we've shot, including our calibration targets on the rover. So the question is whether this is perhaps just a little of the signature of dust. And if so, we might get it more stronger when we get away from the area of the landing where we think a lot of the dust was really blown away. Remind us of how ChemCam works. This is quite an energetic, though short-lived little pulse of energy, right?

Yeah. So the technique is called LIBS. That's laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy. And it works by firing a laser pulse and focusing it down on a small spot. requiring a laser pulse and focusing it down on a small spot. The laser pulse itself, in the case of ChemCam, is five billionths of a second, five nanoseconds long. And in that time, we pump more than a megawatt into the sample, and it's a space smaller than a square millimeter, so that's a very high power density. And with that intense flux of photons, it excites the surface materials

that are ablated in very high temperature states. And of course, anything that's that hot will emit light. It's like a flame or a spark, whatever you want to call it. It's really a little ball of plasma. The images that are before and after, they're not really during. It's possible that maybe a different camera could capture a plasma in the act later on. That'd be a fast shutter, wouldn't it? Yeah. But anyway, so the ChemCam also has this, what's called a remote micro-imager. So it has a resolution about equal to the MastChem 100, which is the highest resolution ever to be on Mars. And so this gives us context images of the spots or locations that we're shooting. And some of these images, I mean, they cover a very small space

because they're looking at your target area, but they're very detailed. Yeah, and since you mentioned it covers a small space, we were trying to get some portraits of people before we launched the thing. And we had to use a mirror 30 feet away so that we could get a person's face on there. No kidding. Yeah, the details that we're seeing on rocks and on whatever we're shooting at is amazing. You can get things, well, just to put it in a human perspective, you could see a human hair seven feet away, which is not what your eye can see. Not bad. Yeah, not bad. Better than a lot

of field geologists. I bet they wish they had that kind of resolution, I guess, with their naked eyes. You mentioned something very briefly, which came up on last week's show. Emily Lockdawalla brought it up, which is that you have these calibration targets. You're really firing two of these pulses each time you hit a rock on the Martian surface. Is that correct? In general, we have a set of calibration targets. That's ten targets on the back of the rover, and we can go to them at any time and shoot. So there are several reasons why we use calibration targets. One is to verify or ground truth what we get on Mars is the same as what we shot on Earth,

and the only way we can do that is to take something to Mars that we've already shot. So that was the purpose of that. There's also some diagnostics we can do by hitting these targets, check the laser performance, and also check basically the wavelength calibration. And so we've been working on that. And we need those sensitive calibrations before we can really give accurate numbers on the surface of the composition of Mars. And they work very much like the photo calibration target,

which, of course, we're thrilled with here because that's the sundial that doubles on it as a sundial, as our boss Bill and I loves. Yeah, that's the sundial that doubles on it as a sundial as our boss Bill Nye loves. Yeah, that's right. And maybe another detail is when we fire libs, the laser is pulsing, and usually we'll shoot something like 30 laser shots on a single location. That way we get better statistics. It also tells us what's happening as you go burrow into the rock just a little ways, and that's how we could get this, see this hydrogen and magnesium on the very first shot.

More about ChemCam from Roger Wiens is just a minute away. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects

that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. What could be cooler? A powerful laser is crawling across Mars, zapping rocks, and telling us what they are made of. This is what we humans do. Roger Wiens is the justifiably proud principal investigator for ChemCam, one of the suite of marvelous instruments on Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. And I want to mention that that noise people may be hearing is not ChemCam in operation outside. It's a leaf blower outside the Planetary Society headquarters, A poorly timed leaf blower. How do you decide which rocks

to target? I had this weird fantasy of other scientists on the Curiosity team and around the world coming to you with bribes, offering you mocha cappuccinos or something and saying, how about this one over here? This one is really valuable. No, we do it without bribes. And so there's a large team of scientists at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and later we'll do this remotely by phone and whatever. But it's basically done by committee,

and so there are priorities set by sort of the leads of the mission, and then that flows down into what's called science theme groups, and these science theme groups are able to decide what is the most interesting thing. That way you get a number of brains and a number of eyes on images and a number of thoughts that go into this, and it's a much better product overall than if you had just one or two people putting in requests. I've got to think, though, that the demand is probably going to outstrip your ability to satisfy it, because you can only zap so many rocks, especially as Curiosity crawls across the surface. Yeah, and so, Matt, there's, of course, lots of competition for the time of the rover.

There's ten instruments, and so we have to share. for the time of the rover, there's 10 instruments. And so we have to share. Things get worked out, and there's horse trades sometimes. There's negotiations going on all the time. But it's fun. This instrument has a very strong international element to it. You worked, I guess, particularly with a French agency?

That's right. So back in 2001, I talked with Sylvester Maurice, who had done a postdoc at Los Alamos, where I am, and had gone back to France. And I suggested that we potentially collaborate on this potential new project. We didn't know what mission it was going to go on. And the French got all excited about this technique, LIBS. And they started actually developing the laser at that time, which eventually became the laser for ChemCam. So really, this is a 50-50 collaboration, France and the U.S. I'm the PI, but it's really a very equitable distribution of work and fun and science. And it's been a lot of fun actually

working together that way. Very enriching. And this is an instrument which there was a time when it looked like it might not have made it to Mars to do this amazing work. There was a struggle. That's true. There was a time when we did go through a challenging time. Basically we thought we would get kicked off the mission. Which would have been tragic. Yes. And the other thing is, how does a rover know what it should be analyzing other than

getting pictures and some remote chemical compositions? If you don't have that, you're really in the blind because deploying the arm is a fairly energy-intensive thing, and that takes a good part of a day, if not all day, in terms of the energy budget. So you just can't analyze everything. But the remote-sensing instruments are the things that are really supposed to look around and tell you what is the most interesting things to spend the most of the larger share of your time on the big investment there is you can think of of the whole analysis strategy as a funnel perhaps the at the top end what gets scrutinized over a large area is the

satellite imaging of course then you go down to the mastastcam and the imaging from the rover which can see up to really 100 meters and more in terms of things that are nearby as well as of course imaging things farther away like the mountain, Mount Sharp but then you come to what can you learn about compositionally so then you come to ChemCam and see what are the compositions nearby.

Then fewer samples are going to get analyzed by the arm and get looked at by the micro-imager on the arm, Molly. And then even fewer samples are going to get analyzed by the laboratory instruments that are sitting inside the rover. We want to invest the best, you could say, by finding the best samples for those techniques that take longer, which are the ones inside the rover. I've got to follow up on one other question about the ChemCam technology, which you and I talked about after emerging from a cave near Carlsbad Caverns last November, which was such a blast. Earthly applications for this and the possibility that ChemCam technology might be adapted for

field geologists right here on this planet. Yeah, there are a number of companies that are now selling LIBS instruments, which is what ChemCam uses. There are some trade-offs. For example, X-ray fluorescence is a good technique to use in general, but if you're looking for the light elements like carbon or hydrogen or nitrogen, things like that, LIBS will be able to do those, whereas XRF cannot. So there are some specific niche advantages. It's being used in Los Alamos for things like carbon sequestration, looking at carbon in soils, as well as some other non-proliferation opportunities. So back to Mars. Where are you headed with your laser next? Are there more targets lined up?

Just in general, the mission, as announced by John Grotzinger last week, is headed towards a place called Glenelg. And it's a junction of three different terrains. and so we're excited to try to find out what those things mean and we'll be zapping along the way as the rover starts getting the wind behind it and moving along. We're hoping to make more measurements along the way. Mars has had a big role in your life for a long time. I think back to a telescope that you designed a very long time ago that you built with your brother out there in the Midwest and first turned it on Mars. Yes, Matt.

The first in-orbit pictures of Mars back in 1971 were sort of a stepping point for us. We had built a telescope for that close approach of Mars, a six-inch telescope. We didn't even get the tube in time, so we had it on a plywood board instead of the tube and mounted it on a fence post, and we got great sketches of Mars from that, and that was kind of a first for me to really see Mars up close and personal. You could not have dreamt at that point that you would one day be roving across Mars with a device that would actually be digging into the surface of the red planet. Absolutely no idea.

That would be out of my mind. Roger, I've got to let you get back to JPL. You're due back over there for more of this mission. We've got to make more measurements. The team is chomping at the bit. Thank you so much for coming by. It is just a blast to talk to you, no pun intended. It's great to talk to a scientist who gets to use the word zap as part of his scientific investigations.

Thanks. My pleasure, Matt. Roger Wiens is the ChemCam Principal Investigator on Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. He's currently working on a book that should be out in early 2013 that will talk about some of these experiences beginning in that Midwestern backyard with his brother and leading up to these amazing successes with ChemCam on Curiosity. He is a scientist, a planetary scientist, physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and also had a big role on the Genesis solar wind sample return mission. Back with Bruce Betts for another weekly edition of What's Up. Welcome. Thank you. Take a look at this bumper sticker.

My other vehicle zaps rocks on Mars. Gosh, Matt, where'd you get that? Roger Wiens had a briefcase full of these, and he kindly left us a few. And we're going to give this one away during the contest today, if that's okay with you. Yes, I would please do. They'll throw in a shirt or a tan. Hey, did you see my tweet that I thought was so funny? No. No one hardly retweeted it, so apparently other people disagreed.

So I'm going to try again on Planetary Radio. Give it a shot. Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good chem-chem laser. Thank you. Thank you. I knew you'd at least give me a chuckle. That's very good. All right.

Thank you. I feel much better. This fully operational chem cam. It's cool. We're zapping rocks on Mars. I've watched the development for a long time of chem cam, and it's working, and it's cool. All right. Let's talk about what's up in the night sky.

You can still see Mars, your very self, evening over in the low in the west and it is hanging out uh near saturn mars looking reddish saturn yellowish and blue star spica also if at least if you're living in the northern hemisphere be sure to check out the so-called summer triangle by looking overhead in the early to mid eveningevening. You'll see three bright stars spread across the sky, but all overhead. That's Vega and Deneb and Altair. You can also see the Northern Cross in Cygnus coming out from one of those three.

All right, we move on to this week in space history. 1962. That's like an even number of years ago. Where were you in 62? That's what George Lucas said. Speaking of George Lucas. Mariner 2. Mariner 2 was launched. The first successful flyby of another planet was launched 50 years ago this week. Very cool. And now we move on to Random Space Fact.

So High Fidelity called, and they said, keep practicing. I know. I just keep trying this singing thing, and I know I shouldn't. So I apologize to everyone. We'll go back to wacky, zany, crazy next time. Viking lander. So we just had the selection of the InSight mission that will head to Mars and land in 2016, the first ever geophysical-focused lander.

And, of course, we'll have a seismometer as well as a heat probe. The only other seismometers on Mars, Viking lander 1 had one, but it failed. It's not the only thing on the mission that didn't work. Viking Lander 1 had one, but it failed. It's not the only thing on the mission that didn't work. Viking Lander 2 had one, and it basically was a wind sensor because it wasn't coupled to the ground. So they actually used it for wind measurements. They may have detected one Mars quake, but everything's kind of fuzzy.

So it'll be nice to have insight in a few years getting a seismometer up close and personal with the surface so we can probe the deep subsurface of Mars. We move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, what is the mass of the plutonium dioxide that is on board Curiosity and its radioisotope thermal electric generator? How'd we do, Matt? I'm going to zip right through this. A lot of very good answers, very entertaining answers,

which, of course, we don't have time to deliver. I will tell you that David Rosenbaum, who's right up the street here in Sierra Madre, he was chosen by Random.org for his correct answer of 4.8 kilograms of plutonium dioxide. So, David, congratulations. You've won yourself a Fisher Space Pen. May I tell you what DJ Byrne said?

Oh, please do. This is hilarious. Now, DJ, he's on the Curiosity team. He worked on the descent radar software for that radar, which got Curiosity down to Mars. Well, as long as he didn't load the plutonium. No, and we should give him lots of pens and shirts and anything just for getting it down safely.

And plutonium. And plutonium. And plutonium. You know where the plutonium is, of course, right? Yes, yes, I do. It's that bulbous thing on the rear end of Curiosity. He added this. Does this RTG make me look fat? I like it.

You had me at bulbous rear end. I'm sorry. I probably went too far in setting that up, didn't I? I like it. You had me at bulbous rear end. I'm sorry. I probably went too far in setting that up, didn't I? Craig Hutchinson points out that we still need to get the government to allow for the creation of more plutonium dioxide so we can have more of these RTGs and send stuff into deep space. Sort of connected to that, though not really, Rennie Christopher. deep space. Sort of connected to that, though not really, Rennie Christopher. He had this long thing about the use of plutonium, the ways that we more traditionally know how it's used, and he finished with the clear moral of the story, make rovers, not bombs. Wow. Or make rovers with bombs.

Ray guns aren't enough. No, no. You need a backup to chem cam. Okay. It's a different kind of plutonium. Okay. We move on to the next trivia contest. What was the first spacecraft to fly by Saturn? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You have until Monday, September 3rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to this one.

And you will win yourself. How about this? We'll take a one-week break from Space Pens. We'll give away the great bumper sticker that Roger Wiens left. My other vehicle, Zaps Rocks on Mars, with Mars and a nice little rendition of Curiosity. And a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Nice. Cool.

A prize package. Prize package. Planetary Radio prize package. Prize package. Splendor Radio prize package. Before we go, let me just mention that we have this guest blog up from Carl Sanczak, who is at Lockheed Martin. He's the acting director of innovation there. We said we'd help them get the word out about their Innovate the Future challenge. And this is pretty cool. They've got up to $50,000 in prizes. You send them your idea, your concept, which can be adapted to a space or anything else,

and you might just get it looked at and win a prize, and who knows, maybe you'll change the world, as our boss says. So it's on our website, but you can also just Google Lockheed Martin Innovate the Future Challenge. Check the blog entry. It is pretty cool. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about lampshades.

Thank you. Good night. Now and then, I have absolutely no response. I can't think of anything. There's no party going on here. I don't have one in my head. But you could. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He's here every week for

What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced for the Planetary Society. He's here every week for What's Up. 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 members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.