Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Smashing Holes in Mars to Look for Life

Episode Date: September 2, 2014

Explore Mars wants to look for life on the Red Planet. Not past life. Life thriving under the Martian surface right now. Chris Carberry will tell us how the ExoLance project might find it.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Smashing holes in 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. Chris Carberry heads an organization called Explore Mars. He'll tell us how he hopes to drive small penetrators deep into the red planet's surface to look for life. Not past life, life that's active right now. Emily Lakdwala will show us where a tiny lander will touch down on a comet, while Bill Nye says NASA is about to decide who will launch astronauts toward the International Space Station.

And then there's our weekly visit with Bruce Betts for What's Up. We begin with the Planetary Society's senior editor. Emily, we could talk about Hayabusa 2. Maybe we'll mention that again at the end. But I'm really fascinated by this piece that you posted on the 26th of August. Rosetta identifies five possible landing sites for, how do you pronounce it? Philae. Philae. Well, that's easy enough. These are beautiful images, some of which you assembled here. People don't be afraid to zoom in on these because you can get right in close on them. And they show off these ellipses, these five ellipses on this comet.

What goes into deciding where to put a lander on a comet? Well, mostly it's where can they get the lander on the comet, because this little lander that they have, it's not guided on the way down. So once they let it go, it's going to drop wherever it's going to drop. And so they have to understand the gravitational field around this strange, lumpy object, and they have to find a location that the little lander will be able to settle down on without sliding down too steep a slope or getting stuck inside a crevasse. So it's going to be interesting, to say the least.

Say something about all these terrific images. Well, what we're looking at are images taken by the navigational camera on Rosetta, which is not its highest resolution camera, but it's the one that does the best job of taking in the whole comet at a single glance. And the whole point is to find a safe location for them to put this lander down. They do have lots and lots of higher resolution images from their science camera called OSIRIS. But the OSIRIS team are keeping their pictures a little closer to the vest than ESA is with their nav cam data. So we can see these beautiful pictures of circular areas, some of them with great big boulders, which are really cool looking,

but a little bit scary if you're talking about a lander. Interesting looking crater features. It's hard to know if they're craters or some kind of comet vent. It's all really kind of unknown what exactly we're looking at with this funky landscape. And we just have to really wait for the end of this mission to understand it. I don't know how I missed that there is an instrument on this lander, which is actually going to try to transmit through the comet. Yeah, that's part of the whole point of the lander, actually. It's got this instrument called CONCERT, which is a radio transmitter and receiver. And once the lander is down on the surface of the comet,

the orbiter will broadcast signals to the lander, the lander will broadcast signals to the orbiter, and they'll do it right through the comet in order to do radar sounding of the structure of the interior. It's going to be a really important measurement to try to understand what the structure of these things is. All right, just one more quick reference to a model of the comet, which is the last image in your entry. Yeah, that image is kind of funny. You know, it's not just members of the public that are struggling with the geometry of this comet with its two lumpy shapes kind of squeezed together. Looks like team members are too, and there's a photo in there

of what looks like a couple of crumpled sheets of notebook paper with map pins stuck in it trying to figure out where these landing sites are. Yes, build your own comet, folks. It's easy. We'll talk about Hayabusa 2 another time, but that was an August 29 entry, Emily documenting the fact that this probe is ready to go out and meet another object in space. Thanks so much, Emily.

Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor and the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Bill, we once again turn to space news for the topic that you want to talk about this week. This out of the August 25th edition of that really fine industry paper, with crew award close, rivals mull future without NASA funds. What the heck is Dan Leone talking about here? Well, this is this commercial crew funding, the better part of a billion dollars that's been distributed to largely three companies,

Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Space, and SpaceX, Space Exploration Technologies. And so the idea is only one of these companies is going to get the nod. They've already invested so much and already spent so much of NASA's money that they're trying to figure if they're going to go forward or keep building hardware, even if they don't get the next phase or so-called final phase of funding. And I just tell you, for my part, Elon Musk and SpaceX, they're the kind of organization that's going to go ahead whether or not NASA participates, because he strongly believes he's got a commercial product that people will embrace. And Boeing is an old military industrial complex contractor. If they don't get this contract from NASA, they'll just

turn it off. They'll go do something else. The wild card for me is Sierra Nevada space. They have, for listeners who aren't familiar with it, it looks like a space shuttle times 0.7. This is their dream chaser. The dream chaser. And I will say, I don't want people to bite my head off, but they may. My old aeronautics professor was always a little bit arms akimbo about the space shuttle because the space plane is mounted on the side of the rocket. And he pointed out all the control problems with that and all the shifting fuel and the eulage, the space above the fuel as it sloshes around. But then Sierra Nevada's plan is to put this miniature space shuttle, the Dream Chaser,

right on top, straight on top of the rocket, which is what my old professor would say was the right way to go. So I'm very hopeful that both SpaceX and Sierra Vada stay in the game. If Boeing stays in the game, so much the better. I feel that the more competition there is, the more rides into low Earth orbit, the better it is for humankind. Sounds good to me. And apparently we will have this decision from NASA. They're not saying exactly, but it could be any day now. And any day now at NASA also can get put off for many days now at NASA. So we'll stay tuned.

But it's something that's going on in the background that most of us as taxpayers, voters, or citizens of the world aren't really aware of. But when these things start flying, we'll all be aware of it. It's an exciting time, Matt. Thank you very much, Bill. Thank you. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Head of another nonprofit organization is coming up in a moment. That would be Chris Carberry of Explore Mars.

If there's life on Mars, and that's a mighty big if, most scientists believe it is beneath the surface, but not necessarily very far beneath. The ExoLance project proposes to drive so-called penetrators right on down to where it may be hiding. ExoLance has not been proposed by any major space agency. Its champion is a relatively small but very busy non-profit. Chris Carberry heads Explore Mars. He previously served as executive director of the Mars Society. Chris joined me via Skype in the middle of an Indiegogo crowdfunding effort that will help get ExoLance off the ground. Chris, it's about time we got you on Planetary Radio.

Welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me on. It is a pleasure. I know we're going to talk about ExoLance. First, I want to hear about Explore Mars. How did this organization come to be? Well, back in 2010, a number of us came together. We thought we didn't want to start another membership organization. There are lots of great membership organizations like Planetary or the Mars Society, NSS, others.

But we wanted to create a program, an organization that would focus on projects, policy work, STEM education, and technical projects, you know, that would focus more on that than on membership outreach and things like that. We love membership groups, but we want to be able to focus. So we started this organization. And we've had a very successful few years running some topical programs and conferences like the Humans to Mars Summit, ISS and Mars conferences. We've also done a lot of policy work and as well as kind of stakeholder meetings like the Affording Mars workshop, as well as a lot of outreach like our Get Curious campaign, which we're about to talk about. But we also have another one, a student-led project called the Time Capsule to Mars project. So we've been rather busy in our first few years of existence, and we're having a lot of fun. I hope we can leave a little bit of

time to mention that Time Capsule to Mars, because that is a fascinating student-run project. Who are some of the other principals involved in this with you? Well, we have, for instance, on our board of directors, the president of our group is Artemis Westenberg, who is a co-founder, and she lives in the Netherlands, so we're an international organization. We have Joe Cassidy from Arrowjet Rocketdyne, who's one of our board members as well. Gary Fisher, who is another former Mars Society person who's on our board. Blake Ortner and Joe Webster and Rick Zucker, who help with the policy works. Rich Phillips from Phillips and Company in Austin, Texas. So we have a wide, diverse group of

people that are working with the group. I know that you guys do a fair amount of advocacy work, as does the Planetary Society. Do you ever cross paths with some of our folks on Capitol Hill? Yeah, actually. And we've collaborated on a number of things, particularly recently we have collaborated with Planetary Society, with the SEA, Space Exploration Alliance, Legislative Blitz in February. And so we had a very good event back in February, and Planetary Society played a large role in building up excitement for that activity. So we were there for two days, and I think we had around 100 meetings, I believe, for that event. Let's go on to some of that technical stuff that you have taken on, new technologies and pretty exciting concepts,

beginning with what's already been mentioned, ExoLance. Give us a thumbnail description of that project. Well, essentially, ExoLance is taking penetrator technology, essentially the same technology we used for bunker busting, the military application. Back last year, when the specifications for the 2020 rover came out, we saw that many of our team members were disappointed there were no experiments for searching for current life on Mars. They're looking for evidence of past life. So we decided we wanted to come up with a way of promoting the concept of looking for current life, extant life. And as we're having these discussions with people like Chris McKay at NASA Ames, Gil Levin, as well as Joe Cassidy

from Aerojet, we decided we needed to find a way to get below the surface. Most experts believe if life currently exists on Mars, it's going to be at least one to three meters below the surface, you know, away from the radiation of the surface. So the penetrator concept came up. Of course, this isn't a new concept. People proposed concept came up. Of course, this isn't a new concept. People proposed penetrator probes on Mars and have actually, missions have gone deep space too. Sadly, not very successfully. I mean, what's different about ExoLance? Well, we don't know what went wrong with deep space too, actually. And that's the problem. They did a lot, a lot of experiments, a lot of testing, and we're utilizing that research.

And so we're taking, you know, we're going to be examining what went right, what we know went right with Deep Space 2, looking at the different configurations, how deep the penetrations went, and we're already having very good success. We have some initial computer modeling that Aerojet's been doing for us that was just released, and it looks very promising. So there's nothing in this concept that says it can't work. We're very confident. As I said before, we don't know what happened with Deep Space 2. Of course, it was attached to an entire mission that failed.

So we can't actually say there was something wrong with the penetrators. We just know that the overall mission failed. Well, give us the mission profile. I mean, this is not just one penetrator, right? There's kind of a flotilla. The concept is to try to send as many of these small penetrators as possible, up to six per mission. Now, the benefit of this, of course, we want to make them light and small, so they're not going to take up a lot of mass on any mission. Now, the benefit of this, of course, we want to make them light and small, so they're not

going to take up a lot of mass on any mission. And if we can drop up to six, that provides a lot of benefits because you'll, first off, there's a lot of redundancy. So if one or two fail, they might hit rocks or something else might happen. You'll still have others. Plus, you'll be able to get results in multiple locations. You know, with current concepts, say if we were going to send a drill to Mars, you'll drill down and that would just be a single location. And if you wanted to do it again, you'd have to wait for another mission. And the way things work, you'd probably be lucky if you got to do it again in another 10 years. So the benefit of ExoLance is we're trying to design these so they could be

flexible enough to go on any number of landing missions. Plus, you would get upwards of six impacts or penetrations per mission, which would be, I think, extremely appealing to a lot of people in the science community and other communities. And to be perfectly honest, it's not just life detection we're thinking about putting in these penetrators. Once we get the results, we want to see what other sorts of payloads, science and other payloads could be placed in these penetrators as well. There are a lot of people who want to get below the surface on Mars,

not just people looking for life. That's Chris Carberry of Explore Mars. He'll be back in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society. We're busy building something new, something unprecedented, a real grassroots constituency for space. We want to empower and engage the public like never before.

If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org.sos to learn how you can become a space advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS. Save our science. Thank you. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat.

We're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Explore Mars Executive Director Chris Carberry and his associates want to make holes in Mars. Their exo-lance penetrators would look for signs

of current life. It's a long shot bet, but if they find what they're looking for, the payoff will be enormous. These things are, they're small, they're tiny. When I looked at it, it kind of looked like a little model rockets that I and others have launched, ones that went the wrong way and buried themselves in the ground. Yeah, absolutely. And that's really the attractive feature. It's also a challenge, of course. They have to be small or we won't be able to get them on any mission. However, the challenge is getting a science payload plus the communications plus the power source compact enough and robust enough to be able to fit within these penetrators. It is a real challenge. And this is, you know, we're not saying this is going to be an easy process. But right now,

over the next year, with this Indiegogo campaign we're running, trying to raise money to build these, at least a test version of this here on Earth, we want to see if we can start really addressing a lot of these challenges, not only how far down in the surface we can get, but also the G-loads on impact and in descent. Also look at the various options for payloads, communications, and energy. What about communications? I mean, you've got just sort of the rear end of what looks like, like I said, a little model rocket sticking out of the ground with a penetrator maybe two, three meters below it, connected by an umbilical. That can't have much of a radio in it. No, it probably won't have much of a radio, but we are looking for just enough to be able to communicate with an orbiter. Yeah, we're not

proposing that we're going to be sending this to Mars ourselves and having us communicate directly from Earth to this lander, to this penetrator. We will be counting on existing orbiters to communicate with it. So you mentioned the Indiegogo campaign. That's underway now, as I understand it. How much are you trying to raise to kick this off? We're trying to raise about a minimum of a quarter of a million dollars. With that, we would build and test the penetrators here on Earth. We would be working with Aerojet and other partners to actually build them and shoot them through these cannons they use to test, well, basically penetration depth. And we could also use that to simulate different regulates, whether it be rocky, clay, ice, ice mixtures as well.

With that money, we're also looking at the various options I mentioned, communication, the app section. You know, it's not just a matter of dropping the thing. We need to also make sure the thing is controlled coming down. So there are a lot of different facets to this that we have to look at in addition to the depth which we can get, but how are we going to be able to communicate and have sufficient power to do it? So there's a lot to pull together here. and have sufficient power to do it. So there's a lot to pull together here.

I mean, if everything went perfectly, when would you hope to drive these little penetrators into the surface of the red planet? All right, if everything went well, and, you know, there are a lot of... And it never does, of course, but... Yeah, well, of course, but there are a lot of ifs here as well. Since we are not proposing sending them to Mars ourselves, we hope to get on other missions. Probably one of the options we were looking at, and this is one of the things we want to spend the money also investigating to be able to pitch to NASA or ESA or other agencies or groups that might send something to Mars, is, for instance, on the 2020 Rover, one of the options we're looking at, while it would be impossible to

get a standard payload on that lander currently or virtually impossible, there's a novel approach that was suggested to us a few months ago, which we are seriously looking at right now. Just like Curiosity, 2020 Rover will have ballast, be carrying ballast. And it drops this ballast as it's entering when it's coming in to EDL, drops the ballast off at two locations or two or more locations during EDL. And so what we're looking at is whether we could replace some of this ballast. Interestingly, the ballast is tungsten bars and our penetrators, the main front section of our penetrators was also tungsten. If we could replace some of that ballast with penetrators, they already have to carry the weight and they already have to

dump that weight off during EDL. Could that weight be put to use where they've already accounted for all of that. We'll be looking at that, looking at the schematics, talking to a lot of folks at JPL and other locations to see if this is actually feasible. We are just about out of time, Chris. Where do people learn more about not just ExoLance, but everything else that you're up to? Well, they go to our website at exploremars.org. At that site, you'll see the first thing you'll see will be the link to the Indiegogo site. We hope people will come on and help support this project. We really want to start building up the momentum over the next month.

This campaign is going on until the end of September, so we're going to put a lot of effort to really building excitement over this final month. Best of luck to you on this, Chris. And we will have to get together again and talk more about other projects. One we didn't have time for, Time Capsule to Mars, where you're working with some students on.

It's kind of far-fetched, but it's exciting to think of students trying to send their own package to Mars under its own power, too. This one would be an independent spacecraft. I look forward to talking again sometime and keep up the good work at Astra, you know. All right. Thank you very much.

Chris Carberry is the executive director of Explore Mars and has been involved in this area for a very long time, including his background with the Mars Society and lots of other activity there within the Beltway in Washington, D.C. We'll be back with, boy, he used to be an Inside the Beltway guy, too. Did you know that? Dr. Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. Got Bruce Betts on the Skype line once again on Labor Day. That's when we're recording here in the United States. Happy Labor Day to you and welcome.

Why, thank you. Welcome to you, Matt. And we're going to talk about what's up in the night sky, or you're going to talk about what's up in the night sky right now. In the evening sky, Mars and Saturn up there separating farther apart. Look in the southwest, west in the early evening, Mars looking reddish, Saturn looking yellowish. In the pre-dawn, we've got two other planets separating apart. The extremely bright Venus, which is very low to the horizon in the pre-dawn eastern horizon. And Jupiter, which is very bright as well, up above that. And if you can get the shot to the low eastern horizon in the pre-dawn,

you'll see on September 5th, Venus only one degree from the bright star Regulus. Of course, even a bright star looks pretty dim compared to Venus. On to this week in space history. In 1976, Viking 2 landed on Mars, and in 1977, Voyager 1 was launched. We move on to Random Space Fact. So I should have asked Chris Carberry to do a celebrity I always forget. Have you noticed to do a celebrity random space fact for us?

Yeah, yeah, I noticed. It's okay, though, because I have an infinite number of them. Apparently so. Well over 500 now. The man of over 500 voices. And I never know what they are. That's the only thought. As seen from Earth in the night sky, the Andromeda Galaxy is about six times wider than the moon.

But we can only see the brightest part with just our eyes. You can't actually see it with just your eyes from a dark sight. But if you have a wide-angle telescope and oculars and you can get a three degree field of view it actually covers all of that and this is what always threw me as a kid because i was always looking because i've seen a few other galaxies that are just you know little pinpoints tiny spirals and i didn't realize that andromeda is just gigantic it is it is gigantic and comparatively close hanging out in our local group, although still two million light years away.

Yeah, comparatively close. Hop, skip, and a jump. Speaking of which, let's skip on to the contest. We asked you what were the names of the five pocket mice flown on Apollo 17. How'd we do? Great response. We've been getting, as you know, big responses lately, and this time we go back to a regular, but somebody who has not actually won the contest

for well over two years. It's Torsten Zimmer in Germany, and I believe he has it. He said the five pocket mice carried on board Apollo 17 were named, these are the unofficial, the informal names, Phi, Phi, Pho, Thum, and Pui. Indeed, according to Gene Cernan. Four of the five pocket mice carried into space. They made it, but one died of complications while circling the moon. Torsten thinks it was Pui. He included a heartbreaking picture of Pui's final day before circling the moon. Torsten thinks it was Phooey. He included a heartbreaking picture of Phooey's final day

before leaving for the moon, and we can't use it because Walt Disney's lawyers are really effective. It's a picture of another very famous female mouse laying on a blanket, pointing up at the moon next to her boyfriend. male mouse laying on a blanket pointing up at the moon next to her boyfriend. And she never returned. Oh, oh, this is not true, kids. Do not, do not worry.

Do you know the official names of the mice? We were given these by several of our listeners. No, actually, I don't. Please, please tell me. Here you go. They're really romantic. No, actually, I don't. Please, please tell me. Here you go. They're really romantic. A3326, A3400, A3305, and so on. Did you know this from Claude Plymate, our friend up in Big Bear City with the solar telescope up there? Six more mice flew on Skylab 3, but make the kids go away now.

Once again, they all died because of a power failure. And then Claude adds, space is hard, mice. Yeah, the tragedy. The tragedy of mice in space. So back to Fee-Fi, Foe-Fum, and Fooey. This from Dan Campbell in Cumming, Georgia. It escapes me why some parents use the same first letter for all their kids' names, unless maybe they're getting deep discounts on monogrammed exercise wheels.

I thought you'd like that. All right, so we are going to send Torsten a Planetary Radio t-shirt, and we're going to send one as well to the winner of this new contest that you're about to begin. I realized we had not played for a long time the game, Where in the Solar System? So I ask you, where in the solar system is Leprechaun Valus? Leprechaun Valus. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to get us your entry. You've got until September 9th.

That'd be Tuesday, September 9th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us your entry. You've got until September 9th. That'll be Tuesday, September 9th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this latest answer. All right, before we say goodbye, is there anything else that we want to mention to folks? Yes, a reminder that the deadline is coming up on September 30th to fly names on the OSIRIS-REx mission to an asteroid and back to hang out in space as well as coming back to Earth. That's to asteroid Bennu. You can go to planetary.org slash Bennu, B-E-N-N-U,

and submit names of yourself, of your relatives, of your pocket mice. Your leprechauns. Your leprechauns. Submit them with an Irish accent, please. I ensure we're done now. Okay. Everybody go out there and look up in the night sky and think about goldfish flakes. Thank you, and good night. I was almost sure you would say Lucky Charms.

He's Bruce Batts. He's our Lucky Charm. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society who joins us each week here for What's Up. Goldfish flakes? Bleh! They're magically delicious. Next week, no big deal, just

the inventor of warp drive. Okay, he's the Star Trek-inspired physicist Miguel Alcubierre who came up with the theoretical work demonstrating that it can be done. Maybe. Or maybe not. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members, who've found the pot of space gold.

Clear skies. Thank you.