Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Steve Squyres Is Ready for Mars

Episode Date: December 22, 2003

Doctor Steven Squyres talks about the challenges, human and robotic, facing the Mars Exploration Rover mission; Emily Lakdawalla is watching for shooting stars...on Mars, and Bruce Betts and Mat Kaplan attend the Planetary Society's holiday party.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is Planetary Radio. And you thought Mars was getting farther away. In some ways, it's never been closer. Hi everyone, Matt Kaplan back with another Martian Odyssey. Stay with us for a great conversation with Steve Squires, the principal investigator for the science instruments on both Mars exploration rovers. Later on you can join Bruce Betts and me at the Planetary Society's holiday party. First up is Emily.

This week she's watching Martian and other skies for shooting stars. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, is the Martian atmosphere sufficiently dense to burn up infalling material? Would a person be able to see shooting stars from the surface of Mars? On Earth, infalling meteorites start to incandesce, or burn up, at altitudes of about 70 kilometers, or 40 miles. At this altitude, the atmospheric pressure is a tenth of a millibar, or about one ten-thousandth of the pressure at the surface of the Earth. The same pressure exists at an altitude of about 40 kilometers, or about 25 miles, on Mars. Hence, these common meteors would certainly appear as shooting stars

to an observer viewing the night sky from the Martian surface, unless a Martian dust storm was taking place at the time. What about other places in the solar system? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Dr. Stephen Squires of Cornell University has been waiting a very long time for this season. His present will come a touch late for Christmas, but at least the arrival of the first Mars Exploration rover on the first

weekend of 2004 will give him a bit of time to enjoy the holidays with his family. He also has just a few more days to squeeze in a few more mundane but essential human necessities, like the trip to the dentist he made just before our conversation. So, Steve, I hear your teeth are now fully flight qualified. Yes, I have flight qualified teeth. What's been going on for the last, oh gosh, week or so? The spacecraft are ready. You know, the hardware is in great shape. We've got all the final command loads on board. Flight software is ready to go. They're targeted on the right trajectories, everything is in good shape.

Where we need to do a little more preparation is back down here on Earth. What has happened is, you know, we've got a couple hundred people working on this team, several hundred people, and we've been working so hard for the past six months since we launched, in fact, the last year, three and a half years since we started building these things, months since we launched, in fact, the last year, three and a half years since we started building these things, that people have not had time for just basic stuff, renewing driver's licenses, dental appointments, flu shots. It's flu season, right? I'm trying to make sure everybody on my team gets flu shots.

What we're trying to do is everybody's just trying to get their lives in order, because we know that when we hit the ground the night of January 3rd and then again three weeks later with Opportunity, our lives are just going to get crazy, and there isn't going to be time for just basic stuff. And I want this team to stay healthy. This is not a sprint. This is a marathon.

I mean, these things are going to last for months. And so what we're trying to do is just make sure everybody does what they need to do to be healthy and rested the night we land. I saw something fascinating yesterday. I was up at the Planetary Society office, and my colleague, Emily Laktawalla, who's going to be up there at JPL with the rest of you guys for a lot of this, was putting this special device on her wrist. Oh, I got one of those, too.

Yeah, I just got mine yesterday. And apparently it's to keep track of. It's part of a sleep deprivation study. Oh, kind of. If you look at NASA's long-range plans for Mars, there's going to be decades of NASA sending spacecraft and sending hopefully someday astronaut crews to Mars. And all of those spacecraft and all of those astronaut crews

are going to have to operate on a Mars time schedule. The Martian day is not 24 hours long. What that means is everybody back on Earth who is communicating with those spacecraft, who is communicating with those crews once we send humans to Mars, those people back on Earth have to live on a Mars time schedule. We were talking with Albert Haldeman about this just a few days ago, and how you guys are going to be advancing your schedules, what, 45 minutes every day? 39 minutes every day. 39 minutes and 35 seconds, to be precise. And what happens is, yeah, if I have a daily meeting to look at the data from yesterday

and plan what we're going to do on Mars today, if that meeting's at noon today, then tomorrow we've got to hold that meeting at 1239. And the day after that, it's got to be at 118. And, you know, two and a half weeks later, it's in the middle of the night. And so our schedules are gradually advancing. And so for decades into the future, NASA is going to be wrestling with this problem of how to have crews of people on the ground doing mission-critical activities for these incredibly valuable assets out in space

while subjected to this significant perturbation to their daily lives. And there's hardly any hard physiological data on the effect of that kind of stuff on human beings. We're kind of operating in the dark here. We don't know what it's going to do to people very well. And so we got the idea some time ago to try to bring in some experts on circadian rhythms and sleep cycles and sleep deprivation, that kind of thing. And at the very same time now that we're conducting our science experiment on Mars, we're going to be guinea pigs now for somebody else's science experiment. They're going to be monitoring how much we sleep, when we're awake,

how we respond physiologically to this Mars time schedule that we're going to have to live on for months, collect data that will enable NASA on future missions to prepare for this kind of stuff. What I love most about this is the thought that while you're doing science, you're going to be doing science. Exactly, exactly. Well, let's talk about doing science, because that's really why you're in all this, as the principal investigator for the Athena payload package. And I think we've talked about this before, and we certainly have with other people.

In terms of what this spacecraft will be able to accomplish, if all goes well, it's going to return, I think, an unprecedented amount of data from the surface of Mars. It's a large volume of data, but I think more importantly, it's data from fundamentally new sorts of tools and sensors and capabilities that have never been to Mars before. You can really think of these rovers as being robot geologists. You know, their job is to go to these two fascinating places, Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum, and to read the story that the rocks there have to tell, to read the tales that are told by the geologic record in those places.

And particularly to find out if those places, despite the fact that they're so cold and dry and barren today, were once places that were warmer and wetter and perhaps more suitable for life. So those are the questions that we're going to answer. And so what we've done is we've equipped these robots with all the capabilities that we think they need to answer those kinds of questions. So they've got 20-20 vision. They've got infrared vision so they can look off in the distance and tell what rocks are made of. They've got the ability to travel hundreds of meters across the Martian surface. Each of them has an arm that's the same dimensions as a human arm and that we can use to reach out and touch the rocks. And then that arm has four fingers on its hand. It's got a microscope. It's got two more

spectrometers to tell us in real detail what the rocks are made of. And then it's got this thing called a RAT, the rock abrasion tool, which is a grinding tool that we can use to grind away the outer layers of a rock if it's dusty or dirty and look into the interior of it and see fresh evidence underneath. And anybody who wants to see some of these things in action, at least as much as we'll be able to until the spacecraft arrives, until the rovers arrive, should go to your website and take a look at the incredible Mars Exploration Rover visualization done by Dan Moss.

Yeah, the URL for our website is athena.cornell.edu. And if you go to that website uh... you will find uh... video that does a spectacular job of uh... depicting what the mission looks like it what uh... what the rover looks like when it's not doing anything now one thing l all warn your listeners about is that the last chance to download that video off of our website is going to come pretty soon because what's

happening is we're expecting a crush of traffic to look at the images once we hit the ground on Mars. And so one of the things we're going to try to do to keep our bandwidth under control is we've got to take some of the videos off the site. So pretty soon we're going to be replacing that with pictures of the real thing. Well, I'm going to put a shameless plug in here then that if anybody wants to see that video in DVD quality on a giant screen and can get to Pasadena on January 3rd or 4th, we will be putting it on the big screen at our Wild About Mars event, of course. Well, I actually saw the video in DVD quality on a big screen for the first time yesterday, and it's stunning.

Yeah, it's pretty incredible. Spectacular. I have the DVD right next to me here as we're speaking, and I can't wait to see it on an 18-by-24-foot screen. But enough plug. We will, of course, be at that event, Wild About Mars, following the very beginnings of what's going on immediately after the touchdown or bounce down, as I've been calling it, of the Mars Exploration Rover. What will you be up to on January 3rd?

Well, at the moment of touchdown, I'm going to be there in the control center with everybody else, kind of hanging on to my seat and hoping for the best. Once we establish two-way communications with the vehicle, which could take, we were expecting that could take as much as 24 hours, we start having pictures coming down. And then at that point in time, we're going to be beginning with the scientific interpretation of the data, planning new imaging sequences, and beginning to think about what exploration we're going to do once we actually get the vehicle off the lander and on its way across the Martian surface.

Well, let's take it from there after we take a quick break and talk about these two sites, which I think you're very happy with, and what you hope you might know in a year from now that you don't know today because of the Mars Exploration Rovers. Our special guest this week is Steve Squires. He is the principal investigator for the Athena Science Payload Package, which is only, as we speak now, a few days away from the Martian surface. We'll be right back. Come to Pasadena's other big New Year's party.

Wild About Mars comes to the Pasadena Convention Center on Saturday and Sunday, January 3rd and 4th. Join Buzz Aldrin, Ray Bradbury, and Bill Nye the Science Guy as the first Mars exploration rover arrives at the red planet. Order your discounted tickets by calling 1-877-PLANETS today. and Bill Nye the Science Guy as the first Mars exploration rover arrives at the red planet. Order your discounted tickets by calling 1-877-PLANETS today. That's toll free, 1-877-PLANETS, or online at planetary.org. Steve Squires is our guest on this week's Planetary Radio. We are talking about the Mars exploration rovers, the first of which, Spirit, arrives are talking about the Mars Exploration Rovers, the first of which Spirit arrives in

just days at Mars, January 3rd at least Pacific time, and what an exciting thing that is going to be. And boy, do I wish we were going to have a view of that touchdown the way it's depicted in Dan Moss' video. I watched

the animation, the visualization, which, as you said a moment ago, is still available on your website, but not for long, and I am blown away every time I see that, when I see that thing bouncing across the Martian surface. And I think, my God, there are sensitive scientific instruments in there. How do they survive this, even in Martian gravity? Are you thinking the same? Well, the thing you've got to

realize when you watch that video is that the video actually makes it look tamer than it really is. I'm serious. There's stuff that we had to slow down so you could actually even see what was happening. The final second or so, second or two before landing,

actually happens a lot quicker than it's really shown in the video. The bouncing goes on for a lot longer. How long? You know, we don't know, but it could be four or five minutes. Good Lord. There's a lot of bouncing and a lot of rolling. You can go a long ways for a long time. It looks violent, and in fact it is incredibly violent.

There is no exaggeration in that video. It really is a very violent process, but it's what the hardware was designed for. I mean, we designed every bit of it to withstand that. We have tested every single device on board that vehicle for stresses, G-loads, that are higher than what we anticipate we'll ever see. Now, here's the kind of crazy question that comes right out of that. Could you do this kind of landing on Earth in Earth's gravity field? Sure. Huh.

Yeah, you could. I'd much rather use landing gear in a runway myself. We don't have those at Mars, so this is what we have to resort to. But, yeah, sure. You've got to realize that a vehicle like this cannot survive every kind of condition that Mars could throw at it. You know, one really severe gust of wind at just the wrong moment,

one big, nasty, sharp, pointy rocket at just the wrong location could kill us. We could have these vehicles. They could be perfect. They could be perfect in every way. They could do exactly what they were asked to do, execute every step flawlessly, and Mars could still kill us. Well, it's a rough environment, isn't it?

And it's a tough job sending stuff to another planet. Yeah, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. Let's talk about where they're going. These really interesting sites, which I think you're pretty happy with. Oh, I'm thrilled with them. We've talked about Gusev. We've talked about the Meridiani site. But give us a little review.

Why are these so exciting? Well, they're very exciting. And the thing that I like about them the best is that they're exciting for two completely different reasons. I love the diversity, because what it means is we can effectively double the science return by going to two completely different places on this planet. Gusev Crater, it's a big hole in the ground. It's an impact crater. It was formed when something hit Mars billions of years ago.

It's about 100 miles in diameter, so it's a very big hole in the ground. What makes Gusev special among all of the craters on Mars is that Gusev has a really big dried-up riverbed flowing into it. There's no water in that thing now. It hasn't been probably for billions of years. But it's long, it's deep, a lot of water flowed through it to carve it. And so it's hard to escape the notion that somehow in the distant past,

a lake must have existed in Guzav Crater. Now, how long was it there? How deep was it? What was the climate like at the time? Was it covered with ice? What were the conditions in it? What was the chemistry of the water? I don't know. That's the kind of question we're trying to answer. But we really believe that there's a high probability that there was a lake in Gusev Crater. And we're hoping that we can actually

find some of the sediments, find some of the materials that were laid down in that lake and learn what that place was like. Now, Meridiani, which is where Opportunity is going three weeks later, totally different, completely different place. Not a trace of evidence for flow of water there in the landforms, in the topography. You don't see shorelines. You don't see dried-up riverbeds, nothing like that there. But what you see instead, completely different from Gusev, is from orbit, we can see the signature at infrared wavelengths of this mineral called coarse gray crystalline hematite. And that's a mineral that on Earth, at least, is usually formed as a result of the action of liquid water, sometimes in deep long-standing water bodies like oceans, sometimes in hot springs,

sometimes just as a result of cold water percolating through the ground. But usually when hematite is formed, not always but usually, it forms as a result of water. And so at Meridiani, what you've got is you've got a chemical signature that water may once have been here, whereas at Gusev, it's kind of a physical signature, and the landforms are two very different places. So this is a tough thing to ask a scientist, and you don't even have to answer. But what would you like to know a year from now that you don't know now? I mean, what are the results you'd like to see? That's a really interesting question.

You've got to be careful when you're a scientist not to wish for a certain result. It can color your vision. It can make you make mistakes. The phrase that scientists sometimes use to describe this is, I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it. That's a mistake you don't want to make. And so it's a bad idea to go into something like this wishing to find a particular mineral or wishing to find a particular kind of rock.

That's something you don't want to do, and it's something that I really don't do. But what I do want to do is I want to find out the truth. I want to find out what these places were like. I'm not wishing them to be any certain way, but what I will consider a success is if a year from now we can look at our data and we can say, yeah, this is what Gusev used to be like. Yeah, this is what Meridiani used to be like. And whatever the answer turns out to be, what I care about is that we build a good enough

machine with good enough instruments that we can provide the answer to that question. That's what I'm hoping for. Excellent. You're going to be at JPL on the 3rd. Oh, yeah. Do you then return to Cornell, or are you going to be in town in Pasadena? Pretty much in Pasadena for the duration. I will make occasional visits back to Ithaca to see my family.

They will come out and see me some. But, you know, it's been 16 years preparing for this. I'm out there until the last rover dies. Wow. So you've got all this data coming in. Do you think a year, is that about the right time frame before you can start drawing conclusions from what gets returned? That's hard to say. It depends in part on how long the rovers last.

I mean, the rovers are designed to last for 90 Martian days, but that doesn't mean that they're going to die on the 91st day. It just means that's when the warranty expires. And how long they'll actually last, we simply don't know. We cannot predict it because it depends on Martian weather conditions, how much dust there is in the atmosphere, how much dust we get on the solar arrays, what the winds are like, you know, a lot of things that we can only guess at. So how long it will take us to figure the data out depends on how long the rovers last,

depends on how complicated the data is, depends on what the landing sites are like. I don't have the slightest idea. But you're going to find out soon. Yeah. Steve Squires, it has been delightful talking with you again. It's nice to talk to you, too. And get some sleep. I'll try, man.

We look forward to having you out this way in Southern California, and certainly we'll be wishing you the best of luck as we all watch NASA TV and biting our nails along with you guys at JPL. Well, thanks very much. We all appreciate that. Steve Squires has been our guest this week on Planetary Radio. He is the principal investigator for the Athena science payload on the two Mars exploration rovers, arriving momentarily at the Red Planet.

I'll be back with Bruce Betts right after this from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. A viewer on Mars could see shooting stars and meteor showers just as they could be seen on the Earth. What about other places in the solar system? There are two other solid-surfaced bodies that have significant atmospheres, Venus and Titan. However, these two objects have skies that are constantly obscured by clouds and haze, so no meteor trails would be visible from the surfaces of these planets. The solar system's giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune,

have no solid surfaces on which to stand to view the meteor showers. And all the other places in the solar system have atmospheres too thin to cause the meteorites to incandesce. So Mars and Earth appear to be the only two bodies where meteors can be viewed in this way. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio.

Bruce Betts, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. Happy Holidays to you as well, Matt. Why do we find ourselves in a crowd once again for What's Up? Because we're so popular that we can't go anywhere without being surrounded by one. And we were dragged into the Planetary Society holiday party. Live from Planetary Society headquarters, it's Planetary Radio. I had to remember what we were doing. And I was going to say, they do all have their backs turned to us,

so I didn't even think they know there's a radio show going on here, which is probably just as well. This is a regular annual tradition, isn't it? It is indeed, going back millennia. Or at least 20-plus years the Planetary Society has existed, the staff, and we invited some of our local friends in and have a lovely holiday celebration. Well, before we make people intensely jealous, let's go on with what's up. What's up this week? Well, we've got all those fun planets to look at, so don't miss them.

Oh, I should probably tell you where they are. In the evening in the west, you'll see Venus extremely bright, brightest object in the night sky. No problem seeing it. That thing, you go, what the heck is that? It's Venus. And then if you look towards the south or for you southern hemisphere people, towards the north at sunset, you'll see Mars, reddish. And then over rising east, a half hour to an hour after sunset will be Saturn.

And in the dawn, you'll see Jupiter up as the brightest object in the pre-dawn sky. And we've had some beautiful skies here in Southern California this week because it's been dry. Our famous sand anticonditions kick in. And one of the nice things about that is you can see more than you usually can. It's true. You can actually see all the way around the Earth sometimes, but it hasn't been that clear. Anyway, how about we move on to this week in space history. Let me just make one note. This week in space history on December 24th, 1968, Apollo 8 goes into orbit around the moon, the first humans to ever orbit the moon. Also the first to do other stuff.

But let me come back to that in Random Space Fact! The first human eyes to directly see the far side of the moon were the astronauts, Borman, Lovell, and Anders, on Apollo 8, the first time that humans had directly seen the far side of the moon, where the astronauts, Borman, Lovell, and Anders, on Apollo 8, the first time that humans had directly seen the far side of the moon. I remember that mission, and there was a lot of fun holiday stuff. It was really cool to have astronauts going right around the moon for Christmas. It was a nice gift. It was. It included profound readings of Genesis stories live.

It was good stuff. Good stuff and paved the way for the lunar landings. Really not that much after. Well, the big raffle is over here. It's time for us to give away a prize. How about this week's trivia contest? All right. From this week's trivia contest, we asked you in a sundial,

what's the thingy in the middle called? How'd we do? And that's exactly how we put it on the website. And so a lot of people wrote back and said you asked what is the name of the thingy that sticks out of a sundial to make a shadow well our winner who is a past winner bill magnuson bill magnuson of malden massachusetts was our randomly chosen everything's random here, our randomly chosen winner this week with the correct answer. He says a gnomon, G-N-O-M-O-N, is the name of that which casts the shadow on the surface of a sundial. He said he also found a reference to it as a style, but that our website, I guess the

Planetary Society website says, a style is the edge of a triangular gnomon. So there you go. There you go. And, of course, Ty being here to the sundials that are on the Mars Exploration Rovers, actually the calibration targets being used as sundials, and then also our EarthDial project that we started on our website, planetary.org. You will find that where you can build your own EarthDial and have your own gnomon and have pictures of your gnomon on our website, planetary.org. You will find that where you can build your own Earth tile and have your own gnomon and have pictures of your gnomon on our website.

So, Bill, you're our winner this week. You get that wonderful calendar. And, boy, stay tuned, you old-timers. We may, before too long, have some really cool prizes to give away, and I won't say another word. Bill says that we should do an unbelievably hard multi-part trivia question to close the year out, the prize being a trip for two to Wild About Mars. Just a thought.

Sorry, Bill. What's this week's trivia question? Well, that would have been a really good idea, but this is the first I'd heard of it. The tickets to Wild About Mars are a great idea, except that we may have a winner from Australia, and we just can't afford to fly them out here. Send them the tickets. But go to planetary.org to learn how you can buy tickets for Wild About Mars, our celebration of the landings of the Mars Exploration Rovers,

January 3rd and 4th in Pasadena. Be there! And instead of our multi-part question, we're going to enter a, well, it's kind of a new thing that I thought I'd do occasionally with the trivia contest. I haven't told you about it yet, Matt, which is the category of famous dead dudes. For this week, what famous dead dude was born on December 25th in the 1600s? We're talking famous dead physics dude. Lots of good physics laws and other things coming from this guy

we'll hope there was only one of them this is probably a dead white European guy right yes it is can we say that much we can say that much but I apologize in terms of diversity aspects

thanks for bringing that out that's it how do people enter the contest? Go to planetary.org slash radio, and you can find out how to enter our contest and win those spectacular prizes. Before we do our holiday farewell, any updates for us? Why, yes, Matt, I'm glad you asked. We have a spacecraft getting to Mars, going into orbit,

and dropping a spacecraft on the surface this week. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, yes, that's right. Mars Express from the European Space Agency goes into orbit this week, and Beagle 2 lander dropped off Mars Express, plunges into the atmosphere of Mars, and attempts to land safely on the surface on December 25th, the universal time. Don't miss it. Follow updates at planetary.org. Universal Time. Don't miss it.

Follow updates at planetary.org. And we will be back again next week with another edition of What's Up and another Planetary Radio. We're being jeered at at the moment. Some people finally noticed that we actually are doing radio here. You keep that up, you're going to have to talk. You know, it's on our website every week for the last year. All right. Well, everyone look up the night sky and be grateful that you don't have coworkers like we do.

Thank you. Good night. Back to the party. There's still food left out there. That's it, everybody. We'll be back next week with another edition of Planetary Radio. We hope you will join us then. Have a wonderful holiday, Christmas or whatever else it is that you are celebrating. And we will

return just before the beginning of the new year. Happy holidays! Yay! Good night!