Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Eyes of a New Mars Rover: Mastcam-Z

Episode Date: February 21, 2018

Mat Kaplan attended a meeting of the science team for the zoom lens camera that will be atop the Mars 2020 rover mast. Planetary Scientist Jim Bell tells us how this new system will show us the Red Planet as we’ve never seen it before.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Greetings, podcast listeners. We'll get started in a moment. First, though, some major news. Planetary Radio is ready to make a giant leap in its own evolution. We are moving the show to panoply.fm, the home of many of the very best podcasts anywhere. For most of you, this will be a seamless transition. Subscribers will get new episodes just as they always have. But we deeply regret that those of you who follow us on SoundCloud or who manually listen to us there will need to make a switch. Panoply is simply unable to support SoundCloud. There are many, many other great choices, including Apple Podcasts,

previously known as iTunes, and the Planetary Society's own home for planetary radio, planetary.org slash radio. Yeah, we'll still be produced by the Society, just as we have been for more than 15 years. SoundClouders, we apologize for the inconvenience. Please join us for many more adventures across the cosmos by making the switch now, and thanks for listening. across the cosmos by making the switch now. And thanks for listening. The best camera ever is headed for the surface of the red planet this week on Planetary Radio.

Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Well, that camera's not going this week, but pretty soon. Planetary scientist and best-selling author Jim Bell leads our visit to Arizona State University to hear about Mastcam-Z, the stereo zoom camera that will leave for Mars in 2020. Join me as we talk with Jim and other scientists working on this powerful imager. More random space facts at the movies when we talk to Bruce Betts later in the program. That's just a fraction of this week's What's Up segment.

We begin with Planetary Society senior editor Emily Lakdawalla, who has posted yet another great blog entry, this time about one of the toughest tasks in space exploration. Emily, I guess the point is, and you make the point very, very effectively, it's really hard to collect samples. It's hard to explore space at all, but when you're also trying to pick up a piece of space and bring it back to Earth, it gets like 10 times harder. Yeah, and sometimes even when you're not hoping to bring it back to Earth, like on Mars, getting it into your sample container where it could be tested. We got to talk about Hayabusa.

It's come up many times on this show, the little spacecraft that could, because it is three of the 10 examples you give. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, if I'd wanted to, I could have made it five or six of the examples that I give, but I managed to condense it down to three. This was a mission that had as many lives as a cat. There are so many things that happened to it that could have just ended the mission right there. But somehow through it all, they managed to bring the sample canister back from an asteroid. And even though there wasn't very much sample in the canister, it was quite enough to do a lot of science with. So that's one mission that just I keep coming back to as an example of how perseverance and creativity, just not giving up, it's all part of space exploration. Now, Hayabusa's challenges weren't entirely human caused. It did have to deal with the worst solar flare in history, recorded history. But more than half of these, or at least half of them, did have some kind of human error involved. Well, I mean, I suppose they did. But you have to

contrast the way that Japan explores the solar system with the way that NASA explores the solar system. NASA spends a lot more money eliminating risk up front. And that means that there tend to be fewer of these kinds of issues on NASA missions, but not zero. And it costs a lot more money. So they do fewer missions, whereas Japan, they tend to be more sporty. They're running smaller spacecraft, trying to do harder things with less preparation. And sometimes they run into problems with it, but they do accomplish amazing things. Sporty. That's a great way to put it. Does any of this documentation of the difficulty of accomplishing this detract from the importance of actually getting a few cupfuls of dirt or some rocks or some bits of dust back to where you can study them very closely?

I don't think it does. I mean, I did have a little hesitation writing this article because I didn't want to look like I was making fun of or criticizing the engineers who worked on these missions. I'm far from it. I have nothing but respect for people who are trying to do things that have never been done before, extremely complicated things involving moving parts that you can't just go out and fix if something goes wrong. So I have nothing but respect for these people. All right, Emily, it is your post as of February 19th to planetary.org. 10 times the solar system has reminded us sample collection is hard. Before I let you go, when does the book come out? It's at the end of March now. All right. And listeners to this program, stay tuned. We may have a special announcement that Planetary Radio will get in on the action with Emily's new book, which is titled, remind me.

The Design and Engineering of Curiosity, How the Mars Rover Does Its Job. Emily Lakdawalla, author and senior editor for the Planetary Society, who joins us now and then. Welcome to meeting number five of our properly spelled science team for Mastcam-Z. It's so great to see all of you. That's how Jim Bell began a three-day meeting of the Mastcam-Z science team. Mastcam-Z is the new and improved version of the main cameras carried by Curiosity, the Mars science laboratory rover that has been exploring the red planet for well over five years. As you'll hear, this new system has capabilities that scientists around the world are looking forward to. The first day of the meeting at Arizona State University

was February 6th, which also happened to be launch day for the first SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The 25 or 30 scientists and others in attendance put aside business for a few minutes to watch the powerful rocket lift off. A few minutes later, they and I watched as those two boosters made their synchronized pinpoint landings back at Cape Canaveral. Wait, are they going for the same pads? Oh my God!

Look at this! That was so sweet. That was so sweet. That was so sweet. Elsa Jensen came to the Mastcam Z meeting from Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California. And my role on this project is I'm the uplink lead. So when we get to Mars, I will be leading the part where we're commanding the cameras, planning, execution, getting the images back. Uplink as in sending the commands to the camera, not downlink, which is those great photos coming back. That's exactly right.

On the Curiosity mission, we are doing both the uplink and the downlink in San Diego. But on this mission, we are doing it in two different places. At ASU, they're doing the downlink, getting the data from Mars, and we're doing the commanding the uplink from Mail and Space Science Systems in San Diego. Something really exciting happened just a few days ago on a, well, first on a workbench at your place, and then outside. Tell me about it. This was a first. The new thing about the Mastcam-Z as compared to what's on Curiosity is that we have the zoom capability.

And what happened in the last week, as you said, is engineers at Mail and Space Science Systems took the zoom out into our parking lot and shot images across the canyon where we are working and took images from the widest angle to the narrowest angle and they all came out great. That was proof that the zoom works, that it's a buildable design and we're that much closer to getting it on Mars. Big, big step. Now this wasn't flight hardware, of course. Right. This was a test unit. It was a unit that was built to prove that the design would work. And in fact, it did.

We've talked before about cameras that you guys develop. Specifically, I might as well say JunoCam on the Juno spacecraft, which is now returning those great images from the outer solar system, orbiting Jupiter. So many cameras have come out of this shop. We have over 100 cameras that we've built at MS-Cubed, and many of them have flown into space. We're in development with many, right as we're speaking, but a lot of them have already proven their worth in space, and this Mastcam-Z is on its way. MS-Cubed because it's Mal is on its way. MS-Cubed

because it's Malin Space Science Systems, S-Cubed. Right. And there were a couple of you here from Malin. Ken Edgett, who's been on the show before, you've been on. You're coming up on an anniversary there. Oh, that's right. Both Ken and I are coming up on an anniversary. Ken two weeks before me. In this coming month, we will both have been at MS3 for 20 years. So if all goes well, and apparently from what we heard today, so far so good, in a couple of years, a little bit more, two and a half maybe, we're going to see this amazing camera on Mars, right? That's right. I can't wait. Thank you, Elsa. You're welcome.

Like the rest of the 2020 rover, the Mastcam-Z team includes many international contributors. One traveled to ASU from Denmark. So my name is Kjartan Kink. I'm at the Nilsboor Institute at the University of Copenhagen. That's the Institute for Physics and Astronomy at the University of Copenhagen. I'm a co-investigator on the MassChemC instrument. And my particular area of responsibility is the radiometric calibration target.

I'm the lead designer on that, and I work on fabricating and testing that. And we just saw a terrific presentation that you made. And there was some adventure in it. One of the test articles being shock tested and so on. It's amazing. People might think the calibration target, okay no moving parts, how difficult could it be to put one together? But you very well demonstrated that there are a lot of challenges to

doing this kind of work. There's definitely a lot of things you have to think about. It doesn't have any moving parts, but it's still glued together with two different kinds of glue and a lot of different parts that we've ordered in. Of course, it's a lot simpler than building the actual camera, but we're a few people too, and you still have to provide documentation beforehand that you've thought about all these issues and how you're going to do all the different steps and get that approved. And so there's a lot of work both with the fabrication

but also with the documentation before and after. Remind us of the role of the calibration target, why it is such an important part of really the camera system, why it's so essential. So part of what the camera can do is's so essential so part of what the camera can do is that it's a multi-spectral camera it has a number of different color filters so it can basically do a simple spectrum it can do color of the surface in more than just red green and blue but in 11 narrow bands of the rainbow going all the way from a little bit into the ultraviolet to a little bit into the infrared. That will help us determine a little bit about the variability in the terrain. It will

help us identify rocks or cliffs or soils that are different from what we've seen before. It will help us tie things we've learned from studying one rock with the arm out into the scene, what other rocks look like that in the camera. It gives us more information than a regular red, green, or blue camera. In order to actually get that information, you want to know the material property. You want to know how does this rock reflect light. And in order to do that, you have to divide out basically with the incoming light, which changes on short time scales. There's different amounts of dust in the atmosphere.

There can be clouds. And of course, the sun moves across the sky. The easiest way we've determined to do that is by having a target, a set of little patches where you know the colors really well in all these different bands. You look at that, you know how that reflects light. That tells you what the light that came in was like. And then you look at the surface. So every time you take a picture of the surface, we take a picture of the calibration target. My boss, Bill Nye the Science Guy, he will look at this, of course, and say, well, that's a sundial, just like on Curiosity and the Mars Exploration Rovers, because you have that little black rod that stands up in the center which is there in

fact to cast a shadow right? Yeah it's there to cast a shadow so it tells us how much of the light at that particular moment came directly from the sun and how much came sort of diffusely from the sky. We will have characterized all these surfaces and they reflect a little bit differently depending on where the light came from and so it's important for us to know how much came from right where the sun was and how much came in sort of more diffusely. It does make it look like a sundial, and we've actually put a little sort of pointing diagram, a little sort of diagram that shows the heading of the rover. So obviously the rover will point in different directions, so it's not that simple to use

it as a sundial. But if you know the time of day, it will tell you the heading of the rover, or if you know the heading of the rover, it will tell you the time of day with some math, and that's obviously not something that we're sort of really going to use scientifically, but it's a neat little feature, extra feature. And like the Mars Exploration Rovers before it, and Curiosity, there is even more going on with this, because it will be used as sort of an outreach, a teaching tool as well. And one of my colleagues is, I'm so proud of him, very involved with this. Yeah, so we've worked

with one of the Planetary Society people, Mark Hilberda, who has helped us develop some little graphics elements, some little images that will be engraved on this and he's done a great job. They look really good. They're still in development, develop some little graphics elements, some little images that will be engraved on this, and he's done a great job. They look really good. They're still in development, so we can't show them to people yet, but they're a lot of fun. Yeah, we're really excited about showing them at some point. The calibration target is going to look really good when it's done. Something else to look forward to with this mission and this amazing camera.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Several of the distinguished members of the Mastcam-Z science team have been heard before on Planetary Radio. One of them happens to be married to Planetary Society Director of Space Policy, Casey Dreyer. Okay, I'm Melissa Rice. I'm an assistant professor of planetary science at Western Washington University, and I'm a co-investigator on Mastcam-Z. Specifically, I'm co-leading the multispectral working group, which is the subgroup within Mastcam-Z that is responsible for planning which filter set, which filters will go onto our camera, and how we're going to use those to interrogate the color variability and spectroscopy of the surface. And you just led a presentation by a whole bunch of people working in this area of how this is being approached. It's a big challenge. I mean, even just choosing the filters that you want to send to Mars.

Every aspect of this is a challenge and takes a lot of discussion and debate. Choosing the filter set was just the first step, and then we needed to decide how we were going to arrange the filters. We have two eyes on this camera, and each eye has a filter wheel with eight spots in it, and so we needed to decide of our full filter set, how would we distribute those between the two eyes, keeping in mind things like one eye might go kaput before the other. So do we want to keep a full wide spectral range capability if one eye goes out, or do we want to cluster the shorter wavelengths in one eye and the longer wavelengths in the other?

And then we need to decide how we are going to order those filters specifically within each individual filter wheel. So those were some of the final results we presented to the team today. And now we are actually analyzing the filter materials that have been made and that will eventually fly on our rover. What did we learn from the Mars Science Laboratory rover that is contributing to what's being planned for 2020? laboratory rover that is contributing to what's being planned for 2020? Yeah, we've learned that there is a large amount of color variability on the surface that is not something that we can see with the human eye. So in the visible wavelengths, Mars is called the red planet for a reason. We see lots of shades of brownish red and oranges, but in the near infrared, we start to see Mars become a much more colorful place. And with mass cam, we're seeing oranges, but in the near-infrared, we start to see Mars become a much more colorful place,

and with Mastcam, we're seeing that those colors in the longer wavelengths can tell us about whether the iron on the surface has been oxidized or reduced and what specific mineral species the iron might be associated with, and that tells us about how those rocks evolved and formed on the surface. And that tells us about how those rocks evolved and formed on the surface. How much better is Mastcam-Z going to be at doing this than Mastcam on Mars Science Laboratory? Well, we hope a lot better, given all the effort we're putting into it. We have a great starting point with Mastcam, but some of the things we definitely want to improve are filling in some of the gaps in the wavelength range that's covered by Mastcam. There are a couple of holes

we're going to fill in, so we're adding some new filters. The big improvement for our multispectral work is going to be the zoom capability, the Z in Mastcam Z. So Mastcam right now has one eye that's zoomed all the way in and one eye that's zoomed all the way out. And so that means that comparing a specific, very small area on the surface between the two eyes means that we're constantly bouncing back and forth between two resolutions, which makes it really hard for us, those of us who work with the filter set, to compare filter data between one eye and the other. But with Mastcam-Z, we're going to be able to get

beautiful wide-angle views with all of our filters, and we'll also be able to zoom way in to features in the distance and get a sneak peek at the color variability of what's perhaps kilometers ahead in the distance. So Mastcam-Z, an improvement over Mastcam. SuperCam, an improvement over ChemCam. Was I mistaken or will there be interesting coordination, collaboration between SuperCam and Mastcam-Z? Definitely. SuperCam is going to have a near-infrared spectrometer, but it's a point spectrometer, which means it'll be able to take a high-resolution spectrum over a long wavelength range, but only of a specific point on the surface. What we can do with Mastcam-Z is collect a lower spectral resolution data set, but from a wide variety of points on the surface. We take an image, and every pixel within that image

will be a spectrum in our Mastcam-Z wavelengths. So between the two instruments, we should be able to combine our powers and use the very specific data from SuperCam, which tells us about a whole lot of wavelengths in one small space, and extrapolate that to what we see in mass cam which tells us about a fewer number of wavelengths but across a much wider spatial area. Introduce us to these two folks that you brought along with you. Yeah I brought two graduate students from Western Washington University with me. Darian Dixon will not be a graduate student for much longer if all goes well next week. A week from today, he's defending his master's thesis at Western, and he's been working on two projects that are specifically for the benefit of the Mastcam-Z program. Kathleen Hosa

is another grad student, the newest in the bunch, and she just started this past fall, and she's starting to develop some capabilities for our laboratory to simulate the viewing geometries that Mastcam-Z is going to see. So Mastcam-Z is going to take pictures at all times of day, and in the laboratory we need to be able to simulate what natural rock surfaces are going to look like when a light source is at any possible angle in the sky. So Darian, I should just say good luck, but I'll say congratulations instead. It's a little bit early for that, I know.

I want to hear from both of you about how it feels just to have this opportunity to be part of the next major mission to go to the Martian surface. It's absolutely amazing. It's honestly, for me, been a dream come true. I've told a lot of people this story. I love talking about it because I think it's a really cool story that I initially, when I first started my undergrad studies, I was a political science major. And at that time period, while I was a freshman, I actually got to, you know, watch on the news the Curiosity rover land and hear about all that at the time, you know, back in 2011 when everything got started. And that was kind of what pushed me to change my major to geology to pursue a career

like this. So just the opportunity to actually be here now and actually help out is completely a dream come true and something that I changed my major for many years ago. Freshman Darian would be really happy to know that this worked out. And you were a little closer to those freshman years just getting underway? I mean, I guess so, but honestly not that different of a story because in 2012 when Curiosity landed, I was an intern at NASA Glenn. I was working doing some engineering stuff there, and when Curiosity landed, like the excitement at Glenn was incredible. Going in the next morning, everyone had been up until 5am

watching it land because it was East Coast time. So yeah, being in there, seeing that excitement, I was like, I want to be on that project. So a year later I was and I'm still on the same track since then. So you're more of a vet than I thought. We should add that Kathleen

has switched from the engineering side of these projects to the science side. So this is her first real event in a room full of the scientists rather than the engineers. So I'm curious what she thinks about that switch and what it feels like to be in this room versus the engineering room. What does the engineering background bring to doing the planetary science itself? Well, my project in particular at Western, it's really easy to answer that because I'm going to be doing some instrument design for, as Melissa said, studying viewing geometry. And I'm going to be using some of the skills that I have with software development, a little tiny bit of machining to be building that will allow us to do the science that we want to do. That's awesome. Being in the science room is great because in the engineering

room, we've got these big blocks where we just say, and then we do science and we move along. And that's like literally what we say that we keep going. So it's pretty cool to get to dive a little bit into more of what it means when we say do science. Darian, where do you see yourself going if all goes well in the next week? If all goes well in the next week, I see myself first taking a vacation. And then after that, I'm honestly not sure. It's a pretty open path in front of me. I've been looking at a lot of opportunities. I definitely don't feel like this is the end for me in planetary science.

So whatever I do, be it getting a job in the meantime or taking some time off, this is definitely something I want to come back to. Definitely something I want to make a career. So I'd say overall long-term goal, I need a PhD. In the short term, I need a vacation. I don't blame you. I'm sure it'll be well-earned. Listen, good luck to both of you in your academic careers and to all three of you as you help to make the 2020 rover on Mars a success. And hopefully, as part of that success, helping to let us know if there once might have been life on Mars, right?

That's the goal, Melissa. That's the big goal. That's what gets me out of bed every morning. Thank you, folks. That's the big goal. That's what gets me out of bed every morning. Thank you, folks. Thank you. Thank you. Melissa Rice and her grad students from Western Washington University. When we return, we'll enjoy an extended conversation with the MassChem Z principal investigator, Jim Bell. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, the director of space policy here at the Planetary Society, and I wanted to let you know that right now Congress is debating the future of NASA's budget. The House has proposed to increase NASA's budget and also increase planetary science in 2018. The Senate, however, has proposed to cut both. You can make your voice heard right now.

We've made it easy to learn more if you go to planetary.org slash petition2017. Thank you. would join us as we nurture new and exciting science, advocate for space, and educate the world. The gift of space starts at planetary.org forward slash give space. That's planetary.org forward slash give space. Because come on, it's space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We'll end our recent visit to Arizona State University with Jim Bell. Jim is a professor in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration. He's also the best-selling author of Postcards from Mars, The Interstellar Age, and other books. He has been part of many missions of exploration around our solar system. Now he leads the effort to build and operate the camera we focused on in

this episode. As you've already heard, Mastcam-Z promises eye-level views of Mars that will deliver stunning images and terrific science as the 2020 rover looks for evidence of past life on the red planet. Thank you for inviting me and the Planetary Radio audience to join this really exciting discussion today. Well, not only was it exciting to talk about Mars 2020, but while we were talking about all this, there's a Tesla in orbit around the Earth. What the hell? A Tesla with a guy, a mannequin in a spacesuit, and Earth reflecting off the side of the car. Unbelievable. You saw how many of us were distracted by the historic events going on with the Falcon Heavy.

I mean, what a success for SpaceX. What a wonderful thing for the country to have this new launch vehicle do its test run so beautifully. It was a thing of beauty. On the other hand, you're sending the greatest camera ever to the surface of Mars. How great a leap is this over, let's say, Mastcam, the camera system, the main camera system on Mars Science Laboratory? I wouldn't describe it as a leap. I think it's a really important next step, right? I mean, because, you know, the way that the Mars program has evolved over the last 20 years, you know, every mission is building upon the previous mission, not really

taking leaps, but just making hops, right? Hopscotching, right? From one discovery to the next, building on those discoveries. And so, you know, we're building on the legacy of Curiosity, the legacy of the mass cams, using the same CCD sensor, for example, many of the same electronic components, very similar filters, although upgraded and updated, and pretty much brand new optics. So the big step in my mind is really being able to do routine stereo 3D imaging. really being able to do routine stereo 3D imaging. It's a struggle with Curiosity because one of Curiosity's eyes is a wide angle camera, the other of Curiosity's eyes is a high resolution camera. And you can do stereo, but it has to be at the resolution of the wide angle camera because you can't invent new data to match the high resolution data. It can be done. There's a lot of stereo that Curiosity's done, but it's at relatively low resolution, and it's just cumbersome to put together. You have to take nine images with the

high-resolution camera to fill one field of view with the low-resolution camera. So now we're going to have this matched stereo pair. We'll be able to zoom in, zoom out with both eyes having the same resolving power, including at very high resolution. We'll be able to use that capability for science. And honestly, the engineers and rover drivers are excited about it too, because we'll be able to not just see off in the distance to look for drive paths and obstacles, but get the stereo 3D data that allows them to plan that drive in great detail. So we'll be helping the operations team, I think, detail. So we'll be helping the operations team, I think, just as much as we're helping the science team. I spent the day sitting like half a

meter from two models of these cameras, then looking at all those slides that were up on the screen, marveling at the exquisite design of these devices. And they're somewhat complicated. There are lenses moving around in there, as there are in any zoom camera that also has to focus. Right, but unlike the zoom capability on a cell phone, on a smartphone, or unlike the zoom capability in a nice SLR lens zoom that you buy off the shelf. These zoom lenses have to be able to take the shocks and vibrations of launch and landing and the crazy thermal environment of being on Mars,

where it gets down to minus 100, minus 110 C every night, and gets up to zero to plus 10 C every day. And that environment, temperatures are swinging back and forth, and there's dust and grit in the air. But it's really the shocks of launch and landing that would rip your smartphone apart, that would shatter a normal off-the-shelf zoom lens. So these have to be ruggedized for the trip and for the environment once we get there. And we saw some testing, not of the cameras, but of the calibration targets. And I hope you'll say something about how important those are and what they were subjected to.

I mean, shock tests that made the guy testing them jump. Right, right. So everything that goes on the rover has to be tested for shocks and vibrations. Everything has to be over-tested. The rocket people tell us, hey, it's going to experience 500, 1,000 Gs of shock, so we have to test them to 1,500, 2,000. We have to make sure that there's plenty of wiggle room, plenty of what engineers call margin in the design

so that if it gets extra shock than we expect, they'll still be able to survive that. So the calibration targets, the cameras themselves, all the electronics, all the cabling, everything else on the rover, all the other 21 other cameras that the rover's carrying, the wheels, everything has to be able to survive those kinds of shocks and vibrations. How is this camera going to be integrated with the other terrific instruments that are going to be carried by the 2020 rover? They work pretty, pardon the expression, synergistically. They do, they do. And we have had already a couple of meetings with some of the other teams and we interact at the project management level with the leaders of the other teams,

everybody is going to want pictures, right? We have to help take pictures so that we can guide the driving. We can take pictures to guide the positioning of the arm. We take pictures to characterize the detailed shapes of the rocks and the soils and the sand dunes and the outcrops so that we can understand their scientific context. dunes and the outcrops so that we can understand their scientific context. And our cameras will do that really well in color from the ultraviolet to the near infrared. Other teams that are, you know, using the laser instrument to determine the chemistry, they're going to want high resolution pictures of those targets. The radar team that we're meeting with on Thursday is going to want to know the details of the topography so they can understand how

their radar is reflecting off the surface and the subsurface. You know, the team for the instruments on the arm, they need the detailed geologic context and all that other imaging. So, you know, we are one science team composed of many different individual payload efforts. there are 21 other cameras on this rover and lander combination. They're really trying to make all the cameras work together. We're trying to make the file names consistent with each other in the file format so that anyone's software can bring in an image from any camera and work with it, and that all the teams have access to each other's data and expertise. We know what cameras like this have in the past and will for the 2020 rover, what they can contribute to understanding the geology of

Mars. How will Mastcam-Z help us determine whether there was ever life on Mars? Well, that's a really good question. Of course, the cameras won't directly detect microbial evidence of life or past life. They just don't have that kind of microscopic resolution. MASS-CMZ won't directly address the life on Mars question unless something gets up and walks in front of the camera and we happen to catch it. Which you might be able to do with video. Four frames per second. We could do that with video. That's true.

But that's unlikely, Matt. Unlikely. We could do that with video, that's true. But that's unlikely, Matt, unlikely. More likely is that by helping the other investigations that are directly looking for organic molecules, that are directly measuring the chemistry, that are taking microscope scale images, by helping them understand how best to target their instruments, by helping them understand the geologic context more broadly of their observations, by helping the future people who will be analyzing the samples that we hope will be brought back from this rover's mission,

by helping them understand the geologic and geophysical context of where those samples were collected. I think all of that is in the realm of moving us all forward towards that life detection goal of the mission. You didn't have your entire team here for this instrument, Mastcam-Z team, but still pretty impressive group. It is. I really, really am impressed with this team. It's a great mixture of, you know, seasoned veterans who've been working on Mars since Pathfinder back in the day. I've worked really closely with many of these folks, including Deputy PI Justin Mackey. We started working together back in 95, 96, when he was working with the imager from Mars Pathfinder, Peter Smith's instrument for that lander mission.

And I've worked with a number of other people on the team, and it's great to have that kind of expertise. But we also have a number of young people who have just started out in the field, great ideas, innovations that they want to bring to all of this, new approaches that maybe some of us who think we know what we're doing might not think of otherwise. So that's really good. And we also have a great group of non-US colleagues from Canada and Europe, a wonderful collection of people who have experience as geologists in the field, as volcanologists, as atmospheric scientists, as camera nerds, just a wonderful collection of people. And a number of our team members are also on other teams too,

so they help that synergy you were talking about between teams. Full disclosure, you are president of the Planetary Society as well as the PI for Mastcam-Z. You know I have to bring up the EPO, the Education and Public Outreach element of Mastcam-Z because the society is playing a role in that. Absolutely. You know, when we were putting our proposal together, all of us who are working on it feel really strongly that, you know, we want to share what we're doing with as many people as we possibly can. And what better way than to partner with the world's largest public space advocacy organization, right? The place to go to for expertise on space and place to go to

for passionate members who care so much about these space missions. So, you know, I know that members will be following along and they'll be spreading the gospel of Mastcam-Z and Mars 2020 all over the place. And so being able to have, you know, someone like Emily Lakdawalla, who's just an incredible resource for the society. She's a treasure. And her expertise in planetary science and her ability to communicate with people and share all of this stuff, that's been wonderful. Bruce Betts, who understands the science behind what we're trying to do, who can put all of this together and help to communicate it well through his work on social media and other kinds of programs. Of course, Bill Nye kind of cares about this kind of stuff too. Who? Yeah, Nye. You heard of him? Our CEO is just as passionate as we are about all this. He was involved in Spirit and

Opportunity and designing the calibration target. He cares a lot about, you know, us getting the colors right and understanding the details of the environment and how can we get those pictures out there as soon as we possibly can and share them with the public. So Planetary Society is just, of course, I'm biased too, right, but the perfect partner to help us get the word out in terms of education and public excitement about this mission. Here's the question I should have started with, but we'll finish with it. What's the status? You're going to be ready to mount these cameras and send them to Mars? Yeah, we just passed a really big milestone, Matt, end of January, beginning of February.

We've built, for the first time, an actual camera. It's all been PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets and scribbles on the back of napkins up until this point. But we've actually built a camera. It's all been PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets and scribbles on the back of napkins up until this point. But we actually built a camera that's not going to go to Mars, but it's made of exactly the same way that will make the cameras that will go to Mars. And the idea, this is called our engineering qualification model. There's a lot of skeptics out there that weren't sure that we could build a Zoom package this small. I mean, this is smaller than a typical can of tennis balls, right? That's kind of that size. And you want to have a very high fidelity, very high quality,

three-to-one Zoom camera system. That's our requirement. We got all these great people together, got the components together, got them assembled with just these amazing teams at Mail and Space Science Systems and Motive and Synopsys and all these other companies assembled with just these amazing teams at mainland space science systems and motive and synopsis and all these other companies and their vendors and subcontractors all the way down the line finally put it together just in the last few weeks and took the first pictures with it and it works beautifully it just works beautifully so we have amazing confidence that when we take

the same components in the same way and build them with the same loving, tender care for the flight cameras, that we're also going to get great quality out of those as well. And we'll be doing that over the next few months. We will be doing some detailed testing of them this summer. We'll do everything we possibly can with them in terms of testing and calibration and making sure that they'll do what they need to do. And then we hand them over to JPL around the end of the summer. And they take them and they will bolt them onto the rover and integrate them electrically and all that with the rest of the systems. And then they're kind of

like, it's like sending your kid off to college. We can't really control them anymore. We don't really know where they're going to go, what they're going to go through, except that they're going to end up on Mars eventually, and it's going to be a heck of a ride to get there. So we'll be kind of sad to see them leave our loving care, but we know they'll be in good hands at JPL. And we'll see them again when we start taking selfies with Mars 2020. Can't wait to see those new postcards from Mars, Jim.

I'm sure we will talk again. Thank you so much for this. Thanks, Matt, for covering this and for being part of this adventure. My thanks also go to the members of the Mastcam's eScience team and to Arizona State University. I took some great photos at the meeting. You can see them on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. Bruce is next. Time yet again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is at the other end of, we don't use Skype anymore. We use this thing called Zencaster, which works pretty well.

Are you out there? Is it working? Hello, hello, hello. Built-in echo. And it allows me to do things like this. Which makes it all so much better. That's why you changed, right? High production values, high class. That's what we do here. And high in the night sky. Oh, nice segue. High in the night sky. Jupiter, if you look in the pre-dawn, it'll be high in the night sky.

It'll be that super bright thing that's brighter than anything else around, you know, unless the moon's up or an airplane's flying by. But Jupiter's actually rising in the east around midnight now, and Saturn rising, I'm sorry, Mars is rising a couple hours after that, of course, also in the

east, and then Saturn after that. So if you look in the pre-dawn, you can find super bright Jupiter up high, and then to its lower left is reddish Mars, lower left of that is yellowish Saturn, and in the evening sky, we're just, it's still tough, but you might be able to see Venus shortly after sunset in the west. We move on to this week in space history. This week, the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the first pulsar discovery. Boy, were those weird. They still are. Yeah, LGM. Little Green Men. Yeah, it turns out it wasn't Little Green Men. It was rapidly rotating leftover stellar cores, but

they're weird nonetheless. All right. You ready? You ready for RSF? I am. But before you give us the new random space fact, I want to mention that to my shock and amazement, apparently our impersonations and use of RSF in movie quotes was very popular. Can you believe it? No.

And I'm sure there are other people out there thinking, no, no, we don't believe it. We got some suggestions from Aram Hakobian, and I'll do a couple of these and then you can close us out with one. Here's some of the ones that he sent. I love the smell of RSF in the morning. It does smell like victory. The name's fact. Random space fact. I don't know which bond that was. And finally, you've got one. We're going to need a bigger RSF. Don't smash the radio. All right. That's enough of that. What do you have for this week? Oh, give us the intro, first of all. Random space fact, random space fact, random space fact. Well done. Thank you. So you may have heard it got a little publicity. There was a Tesla

car on the Falcon Heavy launch, the first Falcon Heavy launch. It was not the first electric vehicle launched into space, but it is the first not flown with the goal of driving on another planetary body. There have actually been several successful planetary vehicles and they just fit into a nice jingle here. So I'm going to start off with more singing. Sorry, everyone. And we'll start with just a dedication to you. Five Matt Kaplans, four Mars rovers, three Apollo cars, two Luna cod, and one you too on the moon. There it is. Every successful planetary rover in history put in a jingle accidentally sung by me. We're going to have to change the classification of this show to music, live music performance instead of whatever it is now.

Thank you. Beautiful rendition. The Tesla is definitely the first electric vehicle in space that is able to do zero to 60 in under three seconds, given some ground to run on. Yeah, depending on what shape it's in by the time it finds any ground to run on. Yeah, and no solar panels and no RTGs as far as we know. Of course, this was Elon's personal car, so who knows what he put in the trunk? You don't want to be on the freeways when he was driving that car. We'll just leave it at that. All right.

We played for the contest. Once again, played where in the solar system? In this case, it was where in the solar system is Dingle Sinus. How'd we do, Matt? Would you be shocked to hear that we got a lot of responses and funny ones for this contest? No, I would not. Good, because we did. And here are some of them, beginning with the person I believe is our winner.

It's Jason Goldstein, formerly of Baltimore, Maryland. He was in Baltimore four years ago, the last time he won the contest, almost four years ago. Now he lives in Beit Shemesh, Israel. He says it's on Titan, the moon of Saturn. It is indeed. And I'd be happy to describe it a little bit more, but I'm guessing our listeners did some of that. Well, we got some of that, but you go first.

A sinus on Titan is a bay, in this case, in a hydrocarbon seer lake. This one is named after Dingle Bay in Western Ireland. But now, what else did our listeners tell us? Christopher Beck in Williamsburg, Virginia, who says, if you want to get there, you start at the north end of Kraken Mare, go north through Tunu Sinus, turning west around Maida Insula, and then around the northern shore of Genova Sinus as it turns north and narrows. And there you are, Dingle Sinus. Apparently he's provided Google Maps for Titan. But I want to go back to our winner, Jason, who is going to get a Planetary Society T-shirt, of course, and a 200-point itelescope.net account.

More about those in a moment. He says, as did a lot of people, it really does sound like just some fake disease a drug company would make up to sell something for. And he even included the commercial for the drug. Eight in ten people have low oxygen because of dingle sinus. Call

your doctor right now. Tell him you need SimPostal. I paraphrase. Lenore Ingram. Apparently, she has an idea of where the name came from. She says, what I want to know is, how did the IAU give Bruce permission to name this thing? I used an anonymous pseudonym. Jimmy Lemke has a different theory. He's in West Allis, Wisconsin. He says it was named by Johnny Cash

because he knew he wouldn't be around, so he gave it a name that would make it tough. Finally, our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, up there in Shawnee, Kansas. If you want to travel to a place where no one goes, just hop a ship to Titan and start following your nose. Then travel up past 80 North where dingle sinus flex, a landscape full of liquid gas.

No need for mucinex. Left you speechless. All right. We are ready to move on. Gosh, I feel like I've let everyone down by not asking more about Dingle's sinus. What two planets in our solar system have about the same surface gravity? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 28th.

That'd be Wednesday, February 28th, the last day of the month. To answer this one, get it to us by 8 a.m. Pacific time. 8 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday the 28th. And you might be the one to win a Planetary Society t-shirt from Chop Shop. You can get there from chopshopstore.com. And while you're there, you can look up the Planetary Society store at Chop Shop. You can get there from chopshopstore.com. And while you're there, you can look up the Planetary Society store at Chop Shop and a 200-point itelescope.net account. 200 points, that's worth a couple hundred bucks on that nonprofit network of telescopes all over this planet, where you're going to be at 1G if you're standing at sea level.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about what it would be like to windsurf on Dingle's Sinus. Thank you. Good night. Cowabunga, dude! He's Bruce Betts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society

and sometimes sings a jingle or two for us here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its high-resolution members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.