Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Envelope Please: Choosing the 2007 Mars Scout Mission, Part 1

Episode Date: July 28, 2003

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This is Planetary Radio. Music Hello again space fans, I'm Matt Kaplan. It's bound to be an anxious week for some terrific scientists and engineers. We are just days away from hearing NASA's choice for the 2007 Mars Scout mission. Only one of four outstanding teams will get the green light for the red planet. We'll meet two team leaders today and two next week. Of course, we'll also hear from Bruce Betts, who's here with a new

trivia contest, and Emily stops by to explain why comets come from every which way. I'll be back in a minute with the first of our Mars Scout Principal Investigators. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Why is the Oort cloud believed to be spherical in shape? Why wouldn't it be spread out into a disk in line with the plane of the solar system? The Oort cloud is a sphere of cometary material located at the far reaches of the solar system, 50,000 times farther from the sun than the Earth. Like the rest of far reaches of the solar system, 50,000 times farther

from the Sun than the Earth. Like the rest of the bodies in the solar system, planets, planetesimals and asteroids, the Oort cloud probably began with a disk-like shape. This disk-like shape was caused by the rotation of the primordial nebula from which the Sun formed. The spin resulted in faster motion of particles in the plane of the Solar System, so collisions between particles were more likely to cause them to scatter outward in this plane. As a result, most of the bodies in the Solar System, including all of the large planets and most asteroids, revolve around the Sun within a flat plane called the ecliptic. However, we know that a group of objects known as the Long Period Comets fall into our solar system's planetary region from every possible direction,

including above and below the ecliptic plane. How do the Long Period Comets manage to come at us from all directions? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. You've spent years planning and preparing. You've given it your absolute best. Your team is as anxious as you are as you wait for the big announcement. And you know there are three competing teams that have worked just as hard, who are just as anxious, and maybe just as good at what they do.

Too bad there can only be one winner. It's not the Academy Awards. It's not the Tour de France. It's the selection of the Mars Scout mission by NASA. Four very fine, very different proposals were named last December as the finalists for a 2007 mission. The one and only winning candidate may be named as soon as this week. Planetary Radio wants you to meet all four of the principal investigators. We'll begin this week with Peter Smith of the University of Arizona

and Lori Leshin of Arizona State. Researcher Peter Smith is with the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona. He serves as principal investigator for a mission with a name that suggests rebirth from the ashes. Peter, why Phoenix? There's some significance in that, isn't there? Oh, there certainly is.

There's been several missions to Mars in the last few years, most of them successful. But in 1999, two missions failed, one being a lander called Polar Lander. The result of the review is after that Polar Lander failure, the 01 landed mission was also canceled. Now, those missions were actually extremely excellent missions, Polar Lander to the south polar layered terrains, and the O-1 lander was going near the equator. So we put together a scout mission using the O-1 lander,

which has been in storage ever since it was canceled, and many of the instruments from Polar Lander and the O-1 lander to make a new mission, and we called it Phoenix because it's reborn out of the canceled missions of the past. And in this, there are some significant cost savings to be found, I believe. Huge cost savings. The spacecraft is essentially built. We have a few modifications we need to make, but we go straight into testing upon selection. Can you talk a little bit about the site that you proposed for a landing?

I mean, it really is in keeping with this NASA mantra, follow the water. We take that mantra literally. We're following the water that was found by the Odyssey gamma-ray spectrometer, and they have actually mapped the water in the northern plains, which is the area we're most interested in because of the high surface pressures. And we now know where the sweet spot is, and we can land on the northern plains of Mars and be very confident that underneath us is a water, ice-rich soil. So all of our experiments are based on understanding the properties of the ice-rich soil.

Talk about those experiments. What will Phoenix be up to when it arrives? Well, the first thing we do is take a lot of images, and I think the public will appreciate that because we take descent images, we correlate them with the orbital images, which are now or will in 2008 be extremely high quality with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imager going into its mission. That's the new planned orbiter with an incredibly high-resolution camera?

30 centimeters per pixel. Incredible. So we'll have super pictures from orbit. Then we'll augment those with descent images. We have panoramic images around our landing site on the surface, both in stereo and color. images around our landing site on the surface, both in stereo and color. And then as we dig a trench using a robotic arm like a backhoe down to the icy layers, we have a camera on the trenching tool on the arm. And even on the deck, we have a microscope.

The microscope allows us to see the individual sand grains. And you will be doing some chemical analysis of these samples that are pulled up? Yeah. One of the more interesting and fundamental experiments that we do is to take some of the soil, both at the surface, well, samples at the surface and near the ice layer, which may be down a foot or two, and we put it in a cell and add water. We stir it up, and then we measure the chemistry of the water. This is really important to find out if the soil is salty or is it oxidizing,

does it have heavy metals in it, the acid and alkalinity of the soil, the basic properties that you need to know to find out when that ice melts, is this a habitable zone where life could exist? Will you be able to detect organic or, dare we say, biological compounds? We certainly can detect complex organic compounds. And what we do is take samples into another instrument called TIGA, and we heat these samples up. And we can heat them all the way from their sub-freezing temperatures,

where they've been collected, up to 950 degrees. So we drive off any of the compounds in there that are related to water-formed minerals, like carbonates or clays with water bound to it, and so forth. And we measure these gases that come out of our oven with a mass spectrometer. Now, above about 300 degrees temperature, you can drive off any organics that might be in this ice-rich soil, and you would know instantly if you had complex organics associated with the ice. Let's talk about the fact that this is a fixed lander.

It's not a rover. You are on the science team for the Mars exploration rovers that are on their way to Mars right now, and I believe you had a big role on the Pathfinder mission as well. Oh, Pathfinder was wonderful. I built the camera for Pathfinder and led the team that actually operated it. We were extremely proud of the kind of data that we were able to return. Beautiful images. So there was Pathfinder, Sojourner, of course, as a part of that mission.

Yours, as we said, is a fixed lander. Why not a rover in this case? Well, if you think about it, if you went to northern Alaska and wanted to dig down and find permafrost, you don't have to walk around a lot to find it. It's everywhere. So we figure we can't afford the complexities of a rover, and a rover with a digging tool on it is like a deployed anchor. So you'd move a little bit and you'd just stay there.

So we figure we'll find the best landing spot where we have high chance of finding the subsurface ice, and we don't need to burrow. And I imagine this, again, it goes back to the substantial cost savings that you talked about, using these instruments that have been basically mothballed. Yes. Our chemistry experiment that I was describing where we add water and we do microscopy is already delivered for the O1 mission. The O1 mission was canceled four months into its final testing phase.

And our robotic arm is already built and delivered. Our camera is a slight modification from Polar Lander. We'd have to rebuild it, but the drawings are already engineered. So we really have substantial heritage, and that gives us a very fast build phase with a long test period. You've got a very diverse, very large team of co-investigators on this, people who are part of the Phoenix team. Anyone that you want to particularly single out? Well, there's William Boynton here at the University of Arizona,

who was the discoverer of the northern polar ice and PI of the gamma-ray spectrometer. He's building our TIGA instrument. We have Chris McKay, who's a very well-known exobiologist. Yeah, we've heard of him. And done a lot of work down in the Antarctic. Previous guest on the show, by the way. Oh, yes. He's really fun to listen to. And who else?

We've got a whole range of people. There's Michael Hecht, who's been studying the properties of water and the Martian environment, low pressure and low temperature. Oh, there's just a diverse team. Yeah, people, centers from all over the country, I noticed. Yeah. Just time, really, for one more question. I hear that when you got the word that Phoenix had been chosen as a finalist,

as we speak, about seven months ago, last December, you were a little excited. I'll say. Well, I was expecting the phone call, but I didn't expect it at 6.30 in the morning. I was in a hotel attending the annual meeting of the Geophysical Union, and it was such a thrill. In fact, I was on the phone with someone else at the time I got the call. I had to hang up on that person. We were doing a little bit of shouting and dancing around,

and, of course, at that time of the morning I wasn't wearing a lot of clothes. It was very exciting. Well, of course, we hope that you will have reason to be excited again soon and wish you as well as your competitor colleagues luck with this for extremely worthy missions. We certainly hope that things go well and very much appreciate your taking a few minutes to be with us on Planetary Radio. Thank you very much. That was Peter Smith, Principal Investigator for the Phoenix Mars Lander.

I'll be back in a minute with our second finalist, Laurie Leshin, to hear about a spacecraft called Skim. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about

these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, planetarysociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Lori Leshin is at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Her team's candidate for the 2007 Mars Scout mission has a name that perfectly describes what they hope to accomplish. S-C-I-M. SCIM, not SIM as some people have thought. An appropriate name for your mission, Lori? It is. It stands for Sample Collection for Investigation of Mars. But really, the SCIM acronym is the right one for us because that's what we do.

We SCIM the atmosphere of Mars, collecting dust and gas as we go, and coming out the other side and bringing those samples back to Earth. A radical approach to doing planetary research. It is a breakthrough, I think, because for 30 years, scientists have been recommending that we figure out a way to get samples back from Mars to Earth because here on Earth we have the capability of tearing apart these samples in exquisite detail, and yet it's a really hard thing to do if you want to land on the surface and drive around and pick up rocks and then carry a rocket with you to blast off.

And there's a lot of complicated things there, and SCIM kind of short-circuits that whole process by just flying through the atmosphere and collecting its samples and coming straight back. Now, NASA, of course, has looked at a lot of possibilities for so-called sample return missions, and they are, as you imply, extremely expensive concept. Yes, it's a difficult thing. It's very scientifically important still to eventually do that mission, and I'm fully supportive of efforts to try and do it.

But it's so important that we try and get materials back to Earth as soon as we possibly can that we came up with the SCIM concept to try and kind of break through that barrier and do it for a much lower cost. Now, SCIM carries no cameras and no instruments on board? Actually, no, that's not true. SCIM carries two on-board instruments, including a camera that will actually look at Mars as we approach it and an image of the planet, and then also take pictures during the actual fly-through, which is going to be really, really neat. And also an institute dust counter that's going to actually count the little dust particles

in another sort of slot, not the ones we're going to collect, but some other ones to let us know that there's really dust there. Now, the other missions that you're up against are generally more traditional orbiters and landers. Yes, there is the Mars airplane as well, but it's still something that has to come down on the surface of Mars. This is such an interesting concept. I wonder how you arrived at it. Well, actually, I will not take credit for the idea. It was actually the idea of a woman named Amy Urevich at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

We came up with it and sort of developed it as a small group of us. It sort of came from the idea of the Stardust mission, which is in January of next year going to fly through the tail of a comet and collect dust particles in much the same way that we will, capturing them in this wonderful material called aerogel. And we sort of started thinking, well, could you do Stardust goes to Mars? And that's really where the idea started. And how much time will SCIM actually spend in this encounter with the Martian atmosphere?

We'll be in the atmosphere for only about five minutes and down in the dust plume for only about 100 seconds. So, yes, it's a very fast and furious mission. We go through it about 14,000 miles an hour. Wow. So it's going to get pretty hot up there. It's going to be toasty, but not as hot as you would think. And we've actually designed the collectors, placed them in just the right place on the spacecraft, and spent a lot of time making sure that everything is going to be able to withstand the heat.

And, in fact, you've run a lot, thousands of computer simulations of this mission and had a very good success rate. That's right. We're actually flying a new-shaped vehicle to Mars. It's a vehicle that's flown in the Earth's atmosphere. It's kind of more sort of conical-shaped than a typical Mars entry vehicle. It allows it to scream through the atmosphere without slowing down very much, which is key to getting us back to Earth.

And we've run lots of simulations with that vehicle and wind tunnel tests on it and things to make sure we really, really understand how this thing flies. How carefully do you have to set up your trajectory to get this just right? Well, you've said it. We do have to point just at the right spot in the atmosphere. It turns out to be well within navigational capabilities that we already have. So it's something you have to pay attention to clearly, but it's not something completely brand new or anything like that.

And then the cool thing is that this vehicle is stable. You just point it and it flies. You don't have to control it actively while it's in the atmosphere. It's completely passive while it's doing this fly through. So it's point and shoot. Does it matter particularly where you point this probe at? Is the atmosphere about the same everywhere? Well, for the best, it actually does matter when and where you go. We're, for the dust, it actually does matter when and where you go. We're going at the dustiest Martian season, which is the southern spring and summer on Mars. And so we'll get there at the very dustiest time of year. And then in addition, the southern hemisphere tends to be dustier than the north. And so we're pointed at in the southern

tropics. How much dust and air do you expect to make it back home with? Well, we're going to collect millions of dust particles, and we're planning on about a thousand of those to be larger than 10 microns, which is a pretty small spill, but large enough that we can slice them into about 50 pieces using technology here on the ground and analyze them on three different continents and a bunch of different labs. And then about a quart, a liter, of gas from the atmosphere. Now, how about that? When these samples get back to Earth, before you can distribute them to the labs, you've got to recover this probe.

How is that going to happen, and what steps are being taken to, will be taken to protect the samples? Right. The spacecraft itself is about nine feet tall and such, and the whole thing doesn't come back to Earth. Actually, the samples get packed up within a sample return capsule that's about the size of a microwave oven, only round, and it will parachute back to Earth. The proposed landing site is the Utah Test and Training Range, which is the same place they're going to bring back these comet samples and also some samples of the solar wind. And they'll be tucked away very safely inside there and have already undergone testing to

show they can survive that. So it's really not an issue there. And then we'll open up the capsule and take the samples to Johnson Space Center where the moon rocks are held and all the extraterrestrial samples that NASA has are curated. And that's where they'll be kept. You are not someone without some planetary exploration experience if you're on. I know you were to be involved with the Mars Polar Lander, the ill-fated 1999 mission, but this is something that you've actually been up to for a long time.

Yes, that's true. I kind of have two lives. I spend a lot of my time in the laboratory studying meteorites, so that's kind of where the laboratory experience comes from. But in addition, I was on the Polar Lander team for the five years we spent getting ready to do that mission, and we came real close. It certainly gives you a taste for trying again. If your mission, the SCIM mission, is chosen, you will be the first woman to serve as principal

investigator on a planetary mission. That's true. How's it feel? Well, it would be an honor, obviously, for anyone who gets chosen. I think it's exciting to think about the possibilities to inspire girls to go into science and technical careers and to show that it is possible to get to the highest levels of space exploration with NASA as a female. And I think that the girls out there should be shown that they should go for it. And we should say that there's been an interesting and very substantial increase in the percentage of women getting involved in planetary science.

There has been, and that's why I think it's time to get one to be in charge of an entire mission. I mean, it's certainly true that women in science and engineering in general has increased a lot, but women make up about 20% of scientists now and about 9% of engineers. So we've certainly come a long way, but there's still further to go. You have a week, maybe less than a week, before you get this announcement of which of the four candidates will be chosen for the 2007 Scout mission, are you going to get much sleep in that time? I hope so.

It's definitely a distracting time. We have one more briefing at NASA headquarters with the person who will make the selection. So once we get through that, then it's really fully in their hands. And then all you can do is sit back and hope that the work you've done for the past two and a half years is going to be what's going to get you there. And we have a great team of people who are ready to go, and so we're confident. Well, as we're doing with all of the candidates, it doesn't make much sense, but we will wish you luck, and it is a fascinating mission.

And I hope it is a week in which you get some rest. Well, thank you very much, and also I should say that Planetary Society has been great with us, one of our main education partners. So we are hoping to be working with you guys and even have my Planetary Society hat on as I'm speaking to you today. So we're thrilled to have that partnership going with us as well. And so I've just lost all my objectivity. But, Lori Leshin, we're very glad that you could take a few minutes out of this very special week to talk with us.

And I'm sure no matter what happens, we'll be talking with you again. Okay. Thanks, Matt. Thank you. Lori Leshen of Arizona State University talking about the SCIM proposal for the 2007 Mars Scout mission. Earlier, we heard from Peter Smith, principal investigator for the Phoenix Lander proposal. Tune in to Planetary Radio next week to hear from their two remaining competitors. Mark Allen of JPL is the PI for the Marvel orbiter, and Joel Levine will tell us about Ares, the Mars airplane.

Back with Bruce Betts right after this from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. How do long-period comets come at us from all directions when the rest of the objects in the solar system all rotate nicely within one plane? The answer has to do with the great distance of Oort cloud objects from the Sun. At 50,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, or nearly a light-year away, the Oort cloud is barely within the grip of the Sun's gravitational field, likely to feel the influence of other nearby stars as they pass by. Although these stars are too far away for the Earth to feel any gravitational effects

of their passing, the orbits of distant Oort cloud objects can be perturbed by these visiting stars. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Back in person for this edition of What's Up with Bruce Batts. Bruce, welcome back. Thank you very much.

I'm once again giddy. Good to know. So what's up? What's up? As always, Mars, Mars, Mars. Go see Mars. Mars in the southeast in the late evening, rising, and then high overhead in the middle of the night, early morning. And brightest object out there, red, orange, fabulous, beautiful, go see it.

And you can learn more about seeing Mars and events talking about Mars at our Mars Watch website, planetary.org slash marswatch2003. Now, for you who are just really lonely and missing other planets, or those heathens who aren't into Mars, you can see Mercury and Jupiter in the evening if you work really hard and have a clear view to the horizon shortly after sunset. You can see them in the west-northwest. This week in space history, July 31st for both of these dates. One, 1969, Mariner 6 flew by Mars, our second flyby of the planet Mars.

And two years later, 1971, the first vehicle driven on the moon by Apollo 15, the lunar rover driven by Scott and Irwin. How about something interesting about space? How about something interesting as opposed to what we've been doing? All right, I'll try. You should really air these criticisms. We're not actually on the air next time. Well, we'll cover it in've been doing. All right, I'll try. You should really air these criticisms. We're not actually on the air next time. Well, we'll cover it in the production meeting.

All right. Random Space Fact! Oh, God. A Mars day is 24 hours and 38 minutes long. That's how long it takes Mars to rotate. Interesting little tidbit is the upcoming, well, they're in flight, the Mars Exploration Rover missions. When they land on Mars, the operations will actually work on Mars time.

They will gear their lives to the Martian clock rather than the Earth clock. Isn't that slowly going to wreak havoc in the lives of all of the mission people trying to control these rovers? Yes. In a word. In a word, yes. All right, should we go to our trivia contest? Yeah, let's do that.

Last week, we asked, what mission had the last U.S. splashdown, and when did it occur? We had the answer being Apollo-Soyuz with the splashdown occurring on July 24, 1975. And every one of our listeners who entered the contest this week got it right. They all said Apollo-Soyuz. Either Apollo-Soyuz or 1975 would have, I think, been adequate. But our winner gave us an enormous amount of information, a little essay here. Our winner gave us an enormous amount of information, a little essay here. Earl Gibson from Radford, Virginia, got the winning correct entry this week.

He says, the last American manned space mission that ended with a splashdown was the Apollo half, interesting point, of the Apollo-Soyuz test project. Purpose of the U.S.-Soviet mission was to test procedures for mutual rescue in space and to demonstrate that the two superpowers could work together to accomplish a goal that would hopefully lead to further cooperation in their manned spaceflight programs, which has pretty much come true. I mean, there's really only one superpower left and no Soviets, but, hey, we're still working together. Exactly.

So that was our winner, and he will be getting that Mars 3D poster. Congratulations. Enjoy. Now, Tyler Ramberg, who won a couple of weeks ago, and we told him it really wasn't a good idea to wear the glasses all the time. You gave him that advice. He wrote again. He said, Bruce could have warned me about the 3D glasses sooner. I was driving the family on our summer vacation to Europa for ice fishing

and got completely lost gazing at Io's magnificent colors. We must have seen 60 moons, including one with a huge crater. What was it called again? Oh, well, Callisto. But sorry, that was our contest last week and Tyler didn't win. But anyway, it was a nice response. Thank you, Tyler.

Excellent response. And you get a lot of points for paying attention to the shows. You lose points for driving through the solar system with 3-D glasses on. But let's be careful out there, people. And the Planetary Society assumes no responsibility for those who drive with our 3-D glasses on. Yeah, keep those windows up really tight, you know, when you're driving through the solar system. Really tight. Go ahead.

What's up for this week? All right. We have the trivia question this week. What planet did Mariner 8 land on? Mariner 8 landed on a planet. All you have to do to win this week is, well, you have to do two things. You have to have the right answer, and it has to be the one randomly chosen from among all the correct answers. And then you, you yourself, will get one of those Mars 3D posters

and the 3D glasses that Tyler abuses. Which we do not recommend. Go to planetary.org, follow the links to Planetary Radio, and you can enter the trivia contest. Realize this week's question is a little tricky. One little update for you. Our buddies Biff and Sandy on the Mars Exploration Rover missions are doing great. Both the Spirit Rover, Opportunity Rover, and their associated spacecraft doing fabulously.

Sandy just experienced her first trajectory correction maneuver. And Biff, amazingly enough, is making attempts to write poetry. You can find out about this by going to redrovergoestomars.org slash astrobots and read their stories. Scary kiddies. I'm hoping that we can get some of these efforts of poetry, both Biff and Sandy's, get them to read some on the air to us sometime. I'm sure they would be happy to.

Look forward to that on future installments of Planetary Radio. And this, of course, is What's Up with Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week right here at the end of PlanetaryRadio. And this, of course, is What's Up with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week right here at the end of Planetary Radio. Look up in the night sky and think about other ways you can use squeegees. Thank you and good night. We're out of time. Don't forget, next week, the remaining two candidates for the 2007 Mars Scout mission.

And we may even be able to tell you who the winner is by airtime. Between now and then, you can check out planetary.org for updates. Thanks for joining us on Planetary Radio. Have a great week.