Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Project Manager and Project Scientist

Episode Date: September 12, 2005

MRO Project Manager Jim Graf and Project Scientist Rich Zurek introduce us to their powerful new spacecraft. Running out of big Near Earth Objects on Q&A, and we get Lost In Space" during the latest What's Up."Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the two guys in charge of it this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Project Manager Jim Graff and project scientist Rich Zurich are closing in on the Red Planet. When they arrive, their spacecraft will take pictures from orbit like nothing we've seen

before. They'll talk about their eagle-eyed bird minutes from now. Bruce Betts keeps us from becoming lost in space on this week's What's Up segment and offers a new trivia contest straight from Neptune. We know you're dying to hear all the latest gossip from around the solar system.

Here's a developing story from slightly farther away, farther as in the edge of the visible universe. NASA has just announced detection of the most distant explosion ever seen. The gamma ray burst is, sorry, billions and billions of light-years away, and therefore took place that many billions of years ago. Thank the space agency's Swift satellite for the find. Just an itty-bitty fraction of a light-year from home, that new

Progress supply vehicle has arrived at the International Space Station. Bruce will have more to say about it later in the show. And right now, here on the surface of our favorite planet, Deep Impact Principal Investigator Micah Hearn and his colleagues have released all sorts of new information about Comet Tempel 1, including many surprises. Ever dig a tunnel right through a snowbank with nothing more than your hands? We do it all the time here in Southern California. Turns out you could do the same right through a snow bank with nothing more than your hands? We do it all the time here in

Southern California. Turns out you could do the same right through Temple One. If anything, it's fluffier than new-fallen snow. Gravity barely holds it together. We'll have to get Mike or someone else back on the show to tell us more very soon. Jim Graff and Rich Zurich are coming up right after Emily provides an update on the search for that big rock with our name on it. See you in a minute. Hi, I'm Emily Locke DiWallo with questions and answers. A listener asked, What percentage of near-Earth asteroids has been discovered?

This answer risks being out of date almost as soon as it is mentioned, but here goes. First of all, it's necessary to ask how large of a near-Earth asteroid one cares about. The major goal of most near-Earth asteroid discovery programs is to find objects that are one kilometer across or larger. These are the objects large enough to produce a global disaster if they should hit Earth. A goal has been set by an international group called the Space Guard Foundation to discover 90% of the kilometer and larger near-Earth objects by 2008. The current consensus is that there should be about 1,100 of these objects out there. As of this month, about 800

have been discovered. That means that the survey has found about 75% of the bodies that they're looking for and have only about 170 discoveries to go to meet the space guard goal. That's pretty good, but there's a hitch. The discovery rate for kilometer and larger near-Earth asteroids is declining. 101 were found in 2002, but only 57 in 2004. What's going on? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. The family of spacecraft already orbiting Mars is about to welcome a powerful new addition. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrives this coming March,

bringing with it, among many other instruments, the most powerful telescopic camera ever to leave Earth orbit. Jim Graff and Rich Zurek have been looking forward to that arrival for five years. As project manager and project scientist for the mission, they sit atop the sizable org chart of team members from eight different agencies led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California.

That put Jim and Rich well within reach of Planetary Society headquarters, where they dropped by a couple of days ago. I have to apologize for the first few minutes of the interview, during which we suffered an annoying technical problem. Trust me, it gets better. Gentlemen, we've talked to a lot of project managers and a lot of project scientists on the show but i it is the first time we've put two together and you even have to share the same microphone well see how that works i tried to come up with an opening question that

was as as much of a leading question as i could possibly think of and I think I came up with it. Why do we need another bird in the crowded skies of the red planet? Rich, why don't you take that first? Well, four years ago, NASA made a decision to emphasize two areas where we should make a major advance. One of those is to see the surface in greater detail. So more resolution, try to cover more area at the best resolutions we have today. The other one was, let's find out what that surface is made of. And that meant using imaging spectrometry in a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum,

near infrared, just beyond the colors that your eyes can see. There are colors that we can use with this instrument to detect minerals on the surface. And those were the two major things. We also wanted to follow up on the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter and make sure that we continue the climate record that the Mars Global Surveyor has started and which we'll continue into the future. Jim, at this point, you've been in space for about a month. So far, a perfect mission. Perfect mission. It started out with a beautiful launch on August 12th,

and that's led to a number of events that we had planned that we've carried out in flight. And right now, the spacecraft bus is performing fabulously. We've met all the goals that we wanted to, including one that we just finished up today, which was a lunar calibration. We used two of our instruments to actually look at the moon of Earth and have returned the data, and the data looks wonderful. So we're really feeling quite upbeat right now. When you got your reception, when you got here to Planetary Society headquarters, right now. We, when you got your reception, when you got here to Planetary Society headquarters, you guys looked fairly giddy. It's obviously been a good day for you. You also did what,

the first of, is it four mid-course corrections a few days ago? Yes, we did a mid-course correction. It's our very first one of four that are planned. A fifth one is optional. And what we did is just took out some of the planetary quarantine bias that we previously had after launch. Quarantine bias. We don't want to go exactly at the planet. We want to be a little bit off from the planet when we release from the second stage of the launch vehicle because we don't want the launch vehicle actually going into the planet

and potentially contaminating it. So we deliberately aim slightly off of our main point. And now we've corrected back on to where we think we want to be. But as we get closer over the millions and millions of miles that we still have to go, we're going to have to adjust just minute amounts to get us right into the right location for the Mars orbit insertion burn. Which is in March of 2006? Yes, March 10th, 2006, about 1.30 p.m. Pacific time. And then you have a remarkably long period where the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is going to be doing some science, but you actually won't reach your final

orbit for something like six months, Rich? That's right, because we're going into orbit around Mars, but it's a very loose elliptical orbit, and we're about 40,000 kilometers away at the farthest point on that first pass around Mars. We want to get down to something that's low and circular, about 300 kilometers, and we do that by dipping into the atmosphere in a process we call aerobraking.

Friction against the spacecraft slows us down. The trick is always to have enough friction to slow you down so you can get there in a reasonable time, but not go so deep that you overheat something on the spacecraft. We do that dance on 500 orbits. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, that's... Usually, I mean, aerobraking is a pretty well-proven technique nowadays, but to do it over that long a period must present some pretty good engineering challenges.

The challenges were quite large, and I think we have actually anticipated them and put into the design of the spacecraft the necessary safeguards to be able to do it and accomplish it safely. One of the things we've done is designed for a much higher temperature. So in case for some reason we see a bloom in the atmosphere and we get a higher density in the atmosphere as we start going through it, we will be able to absorb the additional energy that's put into the spacecraft and continue on. How close will you be coming to that planet? Well, we're actually in a fairly circular orbit.

For Mars, you can't have an exactly circular orbit because the planet itself is a little pear-shaped. And that means that we're going as low as about 250 kilometers over the South Pole up to 320 kilometers over the North Pole. But that polar orbit gives us the chance to see any place on Mars. And we have a ground track that moves around the planet so that in about a two-week period, we're able to target almost any position. But we have to use our spacecraft to roll. And that was one of the challenges for this spacecraft. One of the best factoids that I've heard about this mission

is that you will be returning something like 10 times the data of all other Mars orbiters combined. That's a true statement, including the ones on the surface. Yesterday's calibration actually returned 75 gigabits of data, which I think set a new record for planetary missions returning data in 24 hours. We've designed the spacecraft so it had a 3-meter diameter antenna and about a 100-watt amplifier. And all this was to enable us to get back the data from Mars to Earth. The previous missions have gone forward, have established a capability around Mars which was able to bring

back data at kilobits per second. We found remarkable things with kilobits. But now we said, okay, one of the constraints we've had in these missions is our inability to return data over the distance from Mars to Earth. So let's increase that. So we've moved on three orders of magnitude. We've moved on to a megabit per second. We've come a long way since the 60s. Bruce Murray was on the show once talking about strings of single bits quite in advance. I guess this mission is also something of an engineering testbed in a number of ways, including communication. Yes. Actually, we have some interesting RF gear that's on board. First of all, we normally communicate through a frequency that we call X-band back to Earth.

And there is another frequency that's available to NASA for planetary missions, and that's a KA band, which has a frequency about four times that of X band. That means, theoretically, we can bring four times the amount of data down for the same amount of energy. There are some problems with Ka band, however, and one of them is that you get a large attenuation in the atmosphere if there's moisture in the atmosphere. So the question is, what do you do when it's raining over a station and you weren't anticipating it? So we are pioneering the ability to bring the science data back successfully and not lose it. Another one is the ability to talk to assets on the surface.

on the surface. We have a UHF radio called Electra, and that will go ahead and talk to the rovers and other landers on the surface and provide really a communication link from the surface back to Earth. Busy spacecraft. Rich, we got to talk more about the science when we come back from a break, but we are going to take a quick minute now to catch up a little bit. When we return, it will be with Jim Graff and Rich Zurich, the project manager and project scientist, respectively, for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Stay with us. 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. We didn't just build it.

We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit, and we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org. You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report. It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more? Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387.

The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. Jim Graff is the project manager for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. To his side, as I bet he often is, is Rich Zurek, who is the project scientist. And we have both of them as our guests on Planetary Radio today. And Rich, I said, we got to come back and talk about science. We found the water. We're still following it? We are indeed. In fact, the MER missions, the rovers operating on the surface, their finds, Odyssey from orbit, finding ice in the upper part of the crust of Mars.

All of that says we're on the right track. Follow the waters, the right theme to be pursuing. And that's what we're doing. But we're trying to take it to the next step in a number of areas. We have a radar that will probe into the shallow subsurface beyond the one meter or so of ground that Odyssey is sensitive to. So is that ice that Odyssey saw, is that just in equilibrium with the atmosphere today? Or is it actually literally the tip of an iceberg, a cryosphere that extends much deeper into the surface? Now, I'm not a scientist, so I can say, boy, I hope so.

Of course, because then it's a resource that we could use in the future, as well as giving us an important clue about the history of water on Mars. That's what we're after. And we're after that in other areas as well. Surface composition. We know that there's water ice in the upper crust, but are there minerals that were precipitated in standing bodies of water? Mer says yes, that there were places, but how frequent were those and over what period

of history did those extend? That's what our imaging spectrometer is about and its mineral detection across the planet. And even there, we're zooming in at better resolution than we've ever been able to get before. We've got a footprint that could now cover the Eagle Crater that Murr landed in. And we could tell compositionally what materials were there if they were some of these important minerals. And that's the CRISM? Is it CRISM?

That's the CRISM. Is that how it's pronounced? You have typically great acronyms for the instruments. You've got MARSI, CRISM, SHARAD is the radar instrument. That's the shallow radar. And then, of course, HiRISE, which I knew that you guys were going to be able to get some incredibly high-resolution images with this instrument. you guys were going to be able to get some incredibly high-resolution images with this instrument.

When I read that you have a half-meter aperture on this telescope, 19, 19-and-a-half-inch mirror. Exactly. Amazing. That's a monster that you're going to have in orbit. And we've taken that mirror, and we've moved it closer to Mars than our previous orbiters have been. We're at 300, not 400 kilometers. And with that, you get per pixel,

project that pixel down on the surface, that's a dimension of 30 centimeters. With that, three or four pixels, you can now start to resolve objects that are a meter scale on the planet. The one that I've heard, Jim, it compared to is a dining room table compared to the school bus that we've been able to resolve in the past. Dining room table, probably even a little smaller, maybe a card table. Okay. All right. Well, we'll hold you to that. Well, of course, seeing on the planet depends on contrast.

So another thing we tried to get with this instrument was not just high resolution but good signal to noise. We've got a device called time delay integration where you sum up as you fly along and that gives you much better signal. So better resolution, better signal to noise, that's what we're hoping to open a new vision in what Mars is about. When you think about the high-rise instrument, you should be thinking about a small spacecraft unto itself. It has 16 thermal zones. It's got 14 CCD chips in there. It can take an image that is about 20, Rich, about 20 gigabits. 28 gigabits, excuse me. So we're not talking about a little digital camera. We're talking about taking multiple digital cameras up there and making our images. There is a good section about the HiRISE instrument on your website

with a sort of exploded diagram of this amazing camera, the, I guess, best camera ever to fly into interplanetary space. Well, it's certainly the largest aperture that we've flown. That data rate is what we need to return back to Earth, and that's why we had to have this tremendous capability that Jim was talking about, because you can't just take those bits. You have to get them back home to the Earth, even when we're at great range.

One of the important things to keep in mind is we have the rovers on the surface, and they provide the in-situ measurement of a very, very small location. And what we want to do is be able to take that knowledge and extrapolate it over the entire planet. And so that's what the orbiters really do. It's kind of the yin and the yang of investigation at Mars is get up close and personal,

study the surface, and know what you actually have down there with the landers, and then come along and be able to apply that to the entire planet with the orbiters. You guys come off pretty well. You've got a good team going here. Well, we've been practicing for four years now. Yeah, actually five. You know, like we said at the opening of the interview, it's the first time we've had the project manager and the project scientist sit down at the same time.

I hate to even put it this way, the science versus engineering consideration, which is something we've talked about particularly for the rovers, where there are some major considerations. Do you guys have an easier time than maybe they do on the rover, where the scientists may want to roll up that ridge over there and it scares the engineers to death? No, I think we're probably just as demanding in what we want scientifically as the landers are. And I think one difference, though, has been that we've really got to have a very integrated system here. To get our bits back, our science teams understand they've got to have a capable spacecraft.

And they've built that capable spacecraft, and we're flying it right now. Jim, you're looking forward to March. I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be an exciting time. I call it the white-knuckle time because as we approach the planet, we have to fire the thrusters, and we have to keep them firing for about 25 minutes. And that takes out enough velocity for Mars's gravity to capture the spacecraft. That enables us to move forward to the era-breaking phase that we were talking about earlier.

So it's a very intense time, and there is a period, about 10, 15 minutes, when we actually go behind Mars and we cannot get any radio signals back to Earth. And the burn continues during that period. The burn continues. So that's going to be an exciting, very exciting time for all of us. I know we will want to come back about that time, maybe a little bit before, have either one of you, or I would love to get both of you back on. I know you may be a bit busy as we approach that important event.

But we sure look forward to continuing our reports as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter gets closer and closer to the Red Planet, and I can't wait to see some of those close-up photos. And that's exactly where we are. Gentlemen, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt. Jim Graff is the project manager for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. His partner soon out there at the Red Planet with him is Rich Zurek, the project scientist, and we will continue to report on MRO. In the meantime, you can follow the link from our site, planetary.org, where you may, in fact, be listening to this program, to their site over at JPL and learn much more about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And of

course, we'll continue to cover it in print here on the website. And for those of you who are Planetary Society members, in the Planetary Report. We'll be right back with Bruce Betts and this week's edition of What's Up. But first, a little bit more from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. SpaceGuard surveys are scanning the skies for kilometer and larger near-Earth objects, trying to find 90% of them by 2008. So why are there fewer and fewer of these bodies being discovered every year? Because there are fewer and fewer left to discover. Although there are more telescopes pointed to the sky than ever before, the dwindling supply

of as-yet-undiscovered objects makes the search harder and harder every year. However, these same surveys are gradually increasing the rate of discovery of smaller objects. Although they do not have the potential to cause a global disaster, objects that are 100 to 1,000 meters in diameter could inflict terrible devastation if they fell on populated areas. To date, more than 2,500 of these objects have been discovered and tracked. So far, news from the continuing tracking of these objects is good. None of them appears to be on a collision course with Earth. Got a question about the universe?

Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society and oh so much more. Welcome back, Bruce. What's up? We've got Jupiter and Venus still looking glorious in the evening sky in the west. Take a look at them.

Jupiter kind of disappearing pretty much by the end of this month being still. See it? Two bright star-like objects. Take a look at them. Jupiter kind of disappearing pretty much by the end of this month, being still see it. Two bright star-like objects. Venus just looking stellar, despite being a planet. In the middle of the night, you've got Mars. Even coming up around maybe 10 p.m. in the east, you can see Mars looking like a very bright orangish star right now. And it will continue to get brighter through the end of October. And we've got Saturn low in the east in the early dawn, a little tough to see still,

but will be coming up and will look great over the next several months. On to this week in space history. First of all, a birthday. I know all of you are out there celebrating Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's birthday from 1857. That's right, the father of Soviet Russian rocketry. And more, right? I mean, didn't he come up with a lot of other really cool stuff that people like Robert Goddard built on? Yeah, that's true.

He did. He also came up with the concept of the Mochaccino. Is that right? Turns out. Well, we are in his debt. Yes. And an anniversary that I know you feel I must tell people. The 40th anniversary of the first airing of Lost in Space, the classic or not-so-classic TV show.

Warning, warning! Danger, Matt Kaplan! Danger! Danger, Matt Kaplan! Danger! Yes, I had to pay Bruce to mention that, but it is legitimate. Forty years ago, the introduction of that classic science fiction series that inspired so many astronauts and space scientists and engineers. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm confusing it with Star Trek. On to, speaking of humans flying in space, our human space update as planned. Astronaut and cosmonaut on board the International Space Station, Sergei Krikalev and John Phillips, said goodbye to their former Progress supply ship and hello to a new one on September 8th, which came up and brought them food and fuel and oxygen, water, spare parts, and mochaccinos.

Random Space Fact! spare parts and mochachinos random space fact hey did you know that cassini has discovered on iapetus you probably do you've probably discussed it here but i can't help mentioning the belly band of iapetus the belly band people have actually referred to it that way i have seen it referred to that way i don't think we've talked about it. Okay, well, let's talk about it. Going around the middle of Iapetus, moon of Saturn, Cassini has found this mountain range, which almost exactly matches the equator, and is about 20 kilometers or 12 miles wide, and is really, really, really tall, like 13 kilometers tall. That's like 40,000 feet-ish. Very, very weird. Very impressive. Looks kind of like a walnut. Anybody have any idea how this thing came to be?

People always have ideas, and they all stink. No, they do, but it's quite a mystery. There's no accepted what's going on. Is this something that's been pushed together or something oozing out or the effects of Will Robinson from Lost in Space? Wasn't one of those Reese's peanut butter things. You got peanut butter in my chocolate. You got chocolate in my peanut butter. Somebody whammed these two together. Actually, that was a previous theory for Iapetus because it also has this huge albedo variation,

albedo being a catchphrase for brightness. It's really, really bright and really, really dark, but those albedo variations don't match this spiffy little thing right in the crossing the equator there. So I don't think the Reese's peanut butter explanation is holding much water. Much water? Much milk? I don't know. Anyway, let's move on to the trivia contest.

And we asked you, who were the first two astronauts to work with the Hubble Space Telescope in space who went up on the first repair mission to Hubble. And how did we do, Matt? Lots of entries this week. Our winner, though, is Yanni Lindstrom. Yanni, who actually won a solar sail poster not too long ago. So a little repeat winner here. This time he's getting a T-shirt, which he's happy about, apparently.

A little repeat winner here. This time he's getting a T-shirt, which he's happy about, apparently. And, Yanni, let us know that it was on STS-61 that Story Musgrave and Jeffrey Hoffman did the first repair spacewalk on the Hubble Space Telescope. He got it right, right? That is correct. Wonderful. Well, Yanni, you're going to get that T-shirt in the mail soon. And thank you very much for letting us know how much you're enjoying the program. We appreciate that.

What do you got for us next week? Hey, we're moving out to the outer solar system. Here's your question. What is the second largest moon of Neptune? The first largest is Triton. That's the second largest

moon of Neptune. If you want to answer that and win a Planetary Radio t-shirt, possibly, if you are randomly selected, then go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter and also find out all sorts of wonderful things about Matt Kaplan and his favorite recipes. Okay, not his favorite recipes. No. No.

But be sure to cook up that entry by the 19th, September 19, 2005, at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That'll make you eligible for this latest and greatest trivia contest. I think we're done, or do you have any other announcements for us? I do not.

Everyone go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about tricycles. Thank you, and good night. Tricycles with little bells and horns on them. That's the only way to ride a tricycle. He's Bruce Betts. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's here for us and with us every week on What's Up.

Ding, ding. Join us next time as we talk with the head of the Japanese Hayabusa mission. It's about to arrive at the asteroid from which it will grab a sample before returning to Earth. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Write to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. Have a great week, everyone.