Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Perseverance Rover and a Great First Month on Mars

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Deputy project scientists Katie Stack Morgan and Ken Williford are living on Mars time and living for Mars. We get an update from them on the work of the Mars 2020 rover. Perseverance is already accomplishing terrific science after just 5 weeks on the Red Planet. Katie and Ken also tell us what’s ahead, including launch of Mars helicopter Ingenuity. Then it’s checkmate as Bruce Betts makes his next move across the night sky in What’s Up. There’s more to discover at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/katie-morgan-ken-williford-perseverance-first-monthSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Five weeks on Mars and just getting started, 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. And that is what it sounds like to take a drive on Mars. Can it really have been five weeks since we celebrated the landing of the Mars 2020 rover? You're about to hear that it has been a very busy month plus for Perseverance and its human counterparts here on Earth. We'll welcome co-deputy project scientists Katie Stack-Morgan and Ken Williford for a report on what has already been accomplished and what's ahead, including the first flight by Ingenuity,

the Mars helicopter. You'll also hear the sound of the rover's SuperCam laser zapping rocks. Then we'll take to the skies with Chief Scientist Bruce Betts for a what's up that is as hot as the plutonium that keeps Perseverance rolling. We'll stay on the Red Planet for this first story drawn from the Downlink, our free newsletter. The inside lander has once again found use for that scoop. You know, the one Troy Hudson told us they almost removed before launch? Now it has been used to bury the tether, leading to that exquisitely sensitive seismometer that has detected hundreds of Mars quakes.

This will result in even better data. has detected hundreds of Mars quakes. This will result in even better data. Were you watching when the core stage of NASA's big Space Launch System rocket was tested once again? This time it burned for a full eight minutes, meeting every measure of success. Soon it will head for the Kennedy Space Center and the Moon. The agency still hopes to launch the Artemis I mission late this year. The agency still hopes to launch the Artemis 1 mission late this year. We've got more at planetary.org slash downlink, including a gorgeous new image of Jupiter taken by the Juno orbiter last month. You don't want to miss the galaxy's largest bowling ball.

Here is the sound of SuperCam blasting rocks from high atop the Perseverance rover mast. Okay, it's not exactly a phaser rifle, but you've got to admit, pretty cool. And you'll hear in minutes how those little clicks are adding to the science underway on Mars. Katie Stack Morgan and Ken Williford are key players in the mission. They are the deputy project scientists working under project scientist Ken Farley and more or less working for the scores of other scientists who can't wait to get more data from the rover. We met Ken last July as Perseverance prepared for launch. He directs the Astrobiogeochemistry Lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Biogeochemistry Lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Yeah, it's a mouthful, and you can learn much more about the ABC Lab from that July show. We'll link to it from this week's episode page at planetary.org slash radio. While Ken leans toward astrobiology, Katie is a dyed-in-the-wool Mars geologist. As you'll hear, she has been on the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover team for several years, but she got involved with Perseverance much earlier in its development. Katie and Ken took time away from doing Mars science to join me online a few days ago.

Katie and Ken, congratulations. This is the first opportunity that we've had that I've talked with anybody on the team since that spectacular landing on February 15th. I was one of the millions clutching the arms of my chair and then jumping up and down and screaming when we got through those seven minutes of terror. And then we've also celebrated on Planetary Radio. As you know, we celebrated across the Planetary Society. Where were the two of you as we were watching those tense scenes of all the engineers in the control area? I was at my home in Santa Clarita.

We recently moved. So I was watching it with my husband and my two young kids. But I was dialed into a video environment with the rest of the science team. And so I was sitting at a virtual picnic table with a couple of our team members. And so I was watching it on my big TV. Just like so many of us. Ken, what about you? Yeah, pretty similar situation.

I was at my home in Seattle in the room where I am now, which is my basement office studio type thing. And we have a TV in here and had my wife and my daughter and brother-in-law and his girlfriend. And we were super excited, tense. I was in that same video environment with Katie. And then as it got closer, I just had to focus on the screen. And yeah, we had so much fun and we and you said you were jumping up and down my daughter and I were just dancing you know jumping up and down with joy when at the moment the first pictures came down that's when it really hit me really hard I think I said there's rocks meanwhile I was I was crying I I don't I'm not typically a crying person, but I didn't realize until after Curiosity's landing where I was with 5,000 of

the people at the Pasadena Convention Center? Sure, who wouldn't have? But it was pretty damn great. It was so wonderful to be able to share it with all of you on the team, at least in that virtual fashion. Could the mission be going much better than it is right now, Ken? I don't think so. Knock on wood, things have been absolutely spectacular. There've been a couple minor hiccups here and there. I can't even think of any that are that significant, but yeah, we've been extremely fortunate. Things have really come together wonderfully. And we've actually been able to do quite a bit more science than I was expecting in this early phase, which is so

focused on engineering checkouts. And so there's been, you would have seen, you know, the incredible images that are coming down. And so we're, we're all thrilled. And you could bet we're going to get to some of that very early science as we get a little further into this. Katie, do you have anything to add to that? I mean, it's got to be pretty satisfied. Oh, it is. And this is my, I was on the Curiosity team. I still am. And, but I joined that team relatively late, right before we landed on Mars. And so I missed the whole development period of that mission.

And so when I was experiencing Curiosity, you know, I thought, of course it's working. But for Mars 2020, I've been involved a couple of years prior in the development phase. And so now I understand better the emotions that we feel and the joy we feel when things are working on the surface. And I really am experiencing that now and realizing, having gone through all the trials and tribulations of the development phase, how truly incredible it is that things are working so well and successfully on the surface now. it is that things are working so well and successfully on the surface now. The more I learn about this spacecraft, and I was looking at some videos earlier today preparing for this conversation, the more impressed I am knowing how incredibly complex it is. Well, it's credibly complex, but it's way out there. I just am amazed at some of the technology that has gone into it. Before we leave Curiosity, I'm glad

that you brought up that you're a member of the team, Katie. I just wonder what you think of this latest news from Curiosity that it has reached this outcropping that it has been headed for for so long. There are just some gorgeous images and even an animation done by an amateur, barely amateur, Matthias Malmer. I don't know if you've seen it, but as he shows Curiosity's view crawling around this outcrop, this is big stuff, right? Oh, yeah. We're at Curiosity Rovers positioned at Malmer Coup, which is in the lower sulfate-bearing part of the stratigraphy of Mount Sharp. And we've been waiting for eight and a half years to get to this transition of the clay bearing rocks to the sulfate bearing rocks. And here we are at this transition. And we couldn't have pulled up to a better, more incredible outcrop. And we're just seeing in three dimensions, the layers of Mount Sharp. And there's so much to

learn there about the environments recorded in that rock section, in that outcrop. There's a graphic that's going around from the early days that the artists sketched out of Curiosity with a laser pointed at an outcrop. And here we are at that outcrop now. We're shooting a laser and we're taking great images. And we recently drilled. So that's been going very well on Curiosity. Just a little bit more of that. I saw that a paper has been published led by Ava Scheller at Caltech. Maybe a lot of the water that Mars once had is still there. It's still below the surface in hydrated minerals. I'm thinking of how you mentioned sulfates a moment ago. Maybe up to 99% of that water and that it maybe not as much of it was lost to space as has been talked about so much lately. Do you have any comments about that?

Ken, I want to hear what you think as well. It's a good question because there's this mystery of Mars and how it evolved over time. We think it once had abundant surface water, but obviously Mars today doesn't have that anymore. And the question is, where did that where did that water go? We know that Mars lost its atmosphere and the surface was then exposed to processes that were, you know, able to remove the water. But this finding that that there is a substantial amount of water trapped in minerals on the surface of Mars, I think gives us a different perspective on the evolution of Mars as a habitable planet and its ability to retain that water. And maybe it didn't all blow away, but there are reservoirs of water on the surface of Mars still today that we didn't fully appreciate. Ken, I want to get your thoughts about this as

well, but specifically about what this could mean for biology, or at least past biology. It's a very interesting finding. Of course, hydrated minerals, these that are the mineral reservoir for some of this water we've been talking about, were the kind of spectroscopic signposts that led us into the landing site that we have. As we selected the landing site for Mars 2020, we were really primarily focused on targeting areas that were rich in hydrated minerals. On Earth, we find that biology is very commonly associated with hydrated minerals. And sometimes that's due to this interaction between the hydrosphere, bodies of water, the solid planetary materials, the rocks, and the atmosphere in these complex interactions, including weathering by wind and water, where

water breaks down small pieces of rocks that contain minerals that are not hydrated. But then as they move down through, say, a river into a lake, some of those minerals transform into hydrated minerals, and some of the environmental water becomes trapped in the mineral matrix. That can be useful to organisms that are living in close association with those rocks. But also for our purposes, for Mars 2020 and for Mars sample return specifically, those hydrated minerals offer sort of a little time capsule and they package that water up for us in a way that potentially could

be preserved for billions of years such that we can bring it back to Earth in one of our core samples, extract that water and understand the properties of the water in the environment at the time of the lake in Jezero crater as one example. There it is. Sample return that that holy grail of Mars exploration, robotic Mars exploration. So here we are. we're in Jezero. Is it looking as promising on the ground as it did from orbit? Why it ended up as the place to drop Perseverance? Yeah, it's extraordinary. So my immediate reaction

from those first Hascam images that we got were that indeed there's rocks in front of us and I could immediately start to see differences in tone we got were that indeed there's rocks in front of us and I could immediately start to see differences in tone. There were light rocks and dark rocks and they clearly had a rough texture. And these are the sorts of very basic and general observations we're starting to make. I would say we're getting pretty locked into this very basic question of, are the rocks around us igneous or sedimentary? I mean, it truly is geology 101 that we're doing right now. And we don't know the answer yet. I

mean, we honestly are. Every day, we're hoping for a little bit more data that can help us understand both the texture and the chemistry, the composition of these rocks to help answer that very basic question. But it's looking very promising. We do see multiple different types of rocks around us, and we're starting to make distinctions. Things are looking extremely promising. Let's talk about a couple of those rocks fairly specifically. I know SuperCam has been taking shots at Mars because we've heard it working, and we played some of that audio the third. I think we played audio from Perseverance before we got to talking to you today. Roger Wiens, very happy SuperCam principal investigator.

Katie, those rocks, at least the two that I've read about, I'm sure I'm not going to get the names right. I should just let you do it. But Moz and it looks like Yigo. And these are Navajo words. Maybe you should explain that, first of all, how they got the names, why this naming convention is being used. Yes, I can explain that. Before we even landed with Perseverance and Jezero Crater, the Mars 2020 science team worked to create a geologic map of the Jezero landing area, and we did that by taking the landing area and separating it into quadrangles. So basically areas of the surface that were about one and a half by one and a half

kilometers on each side. And each of our team members signed up to map one of these quadrangles. And we gave each of these quadrangles a name and we chose a theme and Curiosity did something similar. But our theme was national parks and preserves from around the world. Our team members proposed parks, and we assigned those to the quads, and we happened to land with Perseverance in the Canyon de Chelly Quad. Our idea was to use the name of the quad and the national park to inspire the names that we would use on the surface that the rover would observe, the rocks and soil targets and the landforms we see on the surface. And these are informal names. The IAU designates official

names, but it's quite common for rover missions to use informal names on the surface. And so we had the idea to be inspired by Canyon de Chelly. So we actually worked with a member of our Mars 2020 team. He's an engineer. His name is Aaron Yazzie. He's Dine or Navajo. We worked with him to reach out to some of the leaders of Navajo Nation to get their guidance on a set of names we could use to use on the surface for the targets that Perseverance was studying and observing. The president of Navajo Nation, Jonathan Nez, and his council advisors worked with us to come up with a list of Navajo words that we could use on the surface. And as I've come to learn, Navajo is a very descriptive language. And some of the phrases and words they gave us were very

relevant to what we were seeing on the ground, red rocks or rolling hills of sand and pebbles, which I thought was just a beautiful description. So that's where these names are coming from. And for the time that we are in the Canyon de Chez Quad, we'll work with Navajo Nation to grow our list of target names based off of the Navajo language. That's charming. And evidence of a pretty rich language that they had a single word that said Rolling Hills of Sands and Pebbles. I'm very impressed.

And how appropriate. Also makes me wonder if there was a pool as to which quadrant Perseverance would come down in, but I won't expect you to answer that. So tell us about these two rocks. Have we learned something in a very preliminary way, obviously, as Ken was saying, as you've been zapping them with SuperCam? Yes, we have learned about their composition. And what we know so far about their composition is that it's very typical of a type of rock that we call basalt. On Earth, we typically think of basalts as volcanic rocks, and that's volcanic lava that has solidified into a rock. But what we've learned on Mars is that sedimentary rocks can have this similar composition as well. And so Ken had mentioned before this question of are these rocks volcanic or sedimentary?

Sometimes the composition can provide you insight to that question, but it's not so clear for Mars as it sometimes is for us here on Earth. And so we know on Mars that rocks can be basaltic in composition and can be sedimentary. So we're learning more about these compositions. We are seeing them be in family with what we understand the source rocks are for many of Mars rocks, which is volcanic or basaltic in composition. Ken, I've actually seen spectra of at least one of these rocks. It's amazing to think that this is being done from a distance. I mean, true remote sensing, but on the surface. It is. It's really fantastic.

And the remote sensing instruments in particular have been the stars of the show recently and have given us really tremendous data. In addition to the compositional data that Katie mentioned, the basaltic compositions, as we learned from the elemental abundances, the relative abundances of different chemical elements that seems consistent with basaltic composition, that as Katie said, is not necessarily definitive about, you know, is it igneous or sedimentary, because it could be a basaltic rock that weathered and was redeposited as say a sandstone.

In addition to all that, we're getting absolutely spectacular images from the Mastcam-Z instrument and the SuperCam remote microimager, the RMI, which is really this telescope up on the remote sensing mast. And both are producing fantastic images that are showing some very interesting textures, enough to be tantalizing and get us thinking and generating hypotheses, but not yet quite enough to be, again, truly definitive and allow us to make that firm

conclusion and final call. We're all extremely excited to get the Watson imager in play. This is part of the Sherlock instrument, effectively a reflight of the MOLLE, the Mars hand lens imager that is on the Curiosity rover. And for this, your listeners can think about their macro lens attached to their camera, where you get right up close and personal to the rock and take that beautiful high resolution color image of rock texture. And that is what, at least I think, is potentially going to offer the data sets in, you know, in the coming weeks and months that will allow us to distinguish between these different rock types. And of course, then it opens even further as we get the arm-mounted spectrometers

involved and Sherlock and Pixel proper, but that's not going to come for a little ways yet down the road. So I've seen the arm sort of flexing its muscles a little bit, but it's not actually in use yet, apparently, right? And not as we speak. It is actually, yeah, we have been using the arm, but we have not been using the arm to target Watson on rocks to take science measurements. But as you said, the first things that happened were just moving the arm, make sure the actuators on the arm work, make sure the turret can move back and forth. And then we are doing some instrument checkouts. So some very basic checkouts, we've done checkouts of the core a little bit, you know, just moving bits and pieces around.

And then Watson came online actually pretty early because Watson is very useful for engineering purposes. And we needed to look underneath the rover, both before and after we dropped the belly pan. So the belly pan was this piece of hardware sitting right up under the front section of the rover underneath the most complex part of the rover called the adaptive caching assembly, part of the sample caching system, where we have this small robotic arm, the sample handling arm that moves around in this little Coke bottling plant that processes our sample tubes. And we had to drop that belly pan to allow that sample handling arm to move around and do its thing. But also it serves a purpose,

you know, during launch and cruise and EDL, it protects all that hardware. But if we keep it closed, it's actually problematic from a contamination perspective, because there's electronics in there that are always outgassing, and we need to drop that belly pan to get air circulation in. So it's open to the surface of Mars. That's how sensitive we are to contamination in those sample tubes. So all of that was part of it. And you can find these gorgeous images of the sample tubes and the ACA if you look online. I am such a sucker for this stuff. I must have watched the video of that belly plate dropping 10, 15, 20 times just because it's happening on Mars.

What the heck? There is this video as well that shows the caching system in operation. And your comparison to a bottling plant is actually apropos, I think. It's absolutely fascinating to watch. Stick around for much more from my guests guests Katie Stack Morgan and Ken Williford of the Mars 2020 Rover Perseverance team. It's 2021 and mental health is finally a thing. So many people are struggling right now and aren't feeling like their normal selves. Therapy helps and it doesn't have to be sitting around just talking about your feelings. So what

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and you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours. Join the millions of people who are experiencing what therapy is really about because you are your greatest asset. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp and Planetary Radio listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash planet. That's BetterHelp.com slash planet. Katie, we've heard a lot about this, and I'm going to get it wrong again because I never remember whether it's Raman or Raman spectroscopy that can be done using SuperCam, and that this is the first Raman spectroscopy to be

done anywhere off of Earth. Has it been put into use yet? Are we starting to get results there? I don't believe we have employed Raman yet. Ken, you can fill in here as well on rock targets. Yeah, not on a rock target, you're right, but on a calibration target. Right. So we haven't done it on rocks yet, but that's coming in the coming weeks. And what will it do for us, either one of you? I mean, why is it so exciting that we have this first ever Raman spectrometer on Mars? Well, for SuperCam, being a remote instrument on the mast, it's a way for us to identify minerals in a remote way. And that's something that is very different from capabilities on the Curiosity rover. In order to determine mineralogy with Curiosity, we have to go through the whole drilling process and getting

that drill powder into the body of the rover and using our on-lab instruments. With SuperCam, we can fire the laser and get mineralogy. And Raman spectroscopy can get us that as well as the visible infrared capabilities that SuperCam has as well. So our ability to do remote, very kind of low overhead mineralogy is a new capability for this rover compared to Curiosity. I'm with the Planetary Society. We've tried for 25 years to convince people that a microphone ought to go to Mars with, you know, varying amounts of success like Mars Polar Lander. Now you've done it with Perseverance. In fact, you've done it at least twice over.

The sound, of course, is dramatic and fascinating. But I'm also told that it's delivering science, that when we hear those laser hits by SuperCam, that there is actually something you can tell about the material that's being impacted, that's being zapped from the sound. Is that correct? Indeed, we have two microphones on board the rover. We have an entry, descent, and landing microphone

that was designed to capture sounds during the entry, descent, and landing process, which didn't work out, this commercial off-the-shelf microphone. But I think it was more of a software issue, so not a problem with the microphone itself. Anyway, we didn't get sound during EDL to go with those absolutely jaw-dropping EDL camera videos, but we did get sound. We successfully turned it on on the surface. And so we first captured some sound of wind blowing by. And then recently we've released some sounds of the Rover driving. So definitely go have a look at that, have a listen to that. The second microphone is the SuperCam microphone, as you said, and this is fantastic because it's

directional. So you can point it at the target. And the key reason for putting that on from the super cam perspective is to learn something about rock properties. And I guess the easiest way to think about it is that the sound of a laser zapping a rock depends in part on the rock's hardness. So if you imagine, for some reason, in part on the rock's hardness. So if you imagine, you know, for some reason, I'm thinking of a fly swatter, but imagine smacking a hard surface with a fly swatter or a soft thing, you know, the sound would be different. And so this very sensitive microphone, and it picks up the, just the differences in the waveform from a soft target or a hard target. Of course, in addition to that, and particularly because it could be

pointed, the SuperCam microphone, both microphones actually can give us information on wind speed and to some extent, wind direction. And so we're actually starting to use the SuperCam microphone now in an attempt to measure wind in addition to the wind sensors that we have on the meta instrument. And so I can say just on top of all of that, I'm particularly excited about this microphone stuff as an audiophile and musician, and I love microphones and recording. And so I've just been, you know, one of the big advantages people have talked about is how this opens up, these microphones open up a new sense, particularly for people who are say visually impaired. And so much of us are used to experiencing planetary science through our eyes. Every time the new pictures come down from a new location, it's so spectacular, but others can't experience that in the same way. So it's

fantastic to think about people having a new window into Mars through a new sense. But I can tell you, I also have that feeling, even though I've got my eyes. Hearing the rover driving across Mars was literally bringing tears to my eyes. It's just some of us out there experience the world differently through our ears. And I'm one of those people. So I'm as excited as everybody. So we're really all delighted about it. Tell me about it. I'm a radio guy.

I know one of the same people, so I can tell. Thank you for the sound. Thank you for the audio. And I am sure we had someone who attended Planet Fest, our weekend celebration in advance of the landing, of course, who is visually impaired. And I think has been heard from since and talked about how meaningful for her these sounds were as they came back from Mars. If you missed it at the top of this show, go back and listen to some of that newest audio. Katie, what's next? What are you most looking forward to in the coming days from the science standpoint? Well, we talked a little bit already

about the rocks in the immediate vicinity of the rover. But the thing that I had my eye on when we first got those images down was the delta, the Jezero Delta. It didn't disappoint. We saw the front of the delta and we saw what we think are probably the sandstones deposited by this ancient river

in the delta. We're very excited about getting to the delta. That's one of our main exploration targets. The rover landed about two kilometers away from the Delta front. We now have ahead of us a decision about how to get there. We want to get to the Delta, and that's where a lot of our astrobiology targets of interest are. So we're thinking now with the science team, what is our path going to look like as we explore Jezero crater? We're considering now different options and paths to get to the Delta. And we're thinking about the science stops along the way. One of our targets that we're interested in the near term are these remnant mounds that we think

might have been left behind by a formerly more extensive delta or an older lake deposit. And so we have a chance perhaps to sample some of these lake or river deposits sooner than our arrival at the main delta itself. And so we're thinking about those different deposits and what we could see along the way. And it's a little bit like plotting out a road trip. And we're making those same kind of trades. Do you take the fastest route, but maybe it's not quite as interesting, or do you take the longer route, the more scenic route? And so we're making those kinds of trades as well.

So that's what the science team is focused on. And we'll be acquiring data as our instruments come online to help make that decision. I always recommend staying off the interstates. You see a lot more. Ken, anything to add to that? What are you looking forward to? I think Katie captured it beautifully. I guess I have my sights sort of closer to my feet, I guess, if you like. And I'm loving these images of the Delta, but

I am so entranced by these rocks around us. I'm one of these people seeing features in them that I'm just not totally sure are there, you know, and we're, and I'm trying to just squeeze out every last drop of, of every pixel of every image, you know, it's both fun and frustrating to be working right at the limits of the resolution of our cameras, but it's, it's just profoundly exciting to know that, you know, every day we get a little closer and we get a little more and just can't wait till we can start answering some of these questions for real. But the mystery itself is so exciting. This is probably a question I should ask one of the rover drivers, but are there any major hazards or obstructions along the way? I mean, on these possible paths to get into the Delta proper,

or does it look like smooth sailing, Katie? Oh yeah, Jezero is an interesting place from a hazard perspective. And actually this was something that we thought about even going back to the landing site selection because Jezero has a lot of rocks, a lot of sand, and it has scarps from the front of the Delta.

And so this isn't typically the kind of place that engineers would pick on the map and say, let's land here. But scientifically, this was a place that we felt was really important. And we chose it as the landing site. So they made it work for us. But now we're on the ground and having to grapple with those hazards from the scale of the rover. Where we landed with Perseverance, actually just to our west, between us and the Delta, is this area that we call Sita, which is amongst the sand in Navajo. And it is full of these sand bed forms, the sand dunes. The rover planners aren't too excited about taking us directly across this sandy area. And so we're considering paths to go

around this sandy area. Of course, that area has a lot of rocks in it. And so we're considering paths to go around this sandy area. Of course, that area has a lot of rocks in it. And so we're having to deal with different types of hazards. But there are paths. There are multiple paths to get us around Jezero to the things we're interested in. But this is one of the trades we make. Do you take a path that is going to be a little slower driving because maybe there are more hazards, but maybe more scientifically interesting as it often happens. Or if you take that kind of freeway route that may be a little easier driving, but which easier driving often means less outprop exposure. And so that's the trade you have to make. So we'll find a way to go see the rocks that we want to see and that are interesting to us.

I bet you're both glad that they put the heavy duty wheels on this rover. Yes, definitely. Along the way, and we may only be a few days away from this now, as we speak, a press conference about it is coming up, that little helicopter, Ingenuity, is going to be dropped off and make its first flight. I know it's not strictly speaking a science portion of the mission, but I have to think you must be excited about this idea of a first flying machine on another world. Ken?

Yeah, I am. We have been so focused over the years on making absolutely sure the rover and all of our science instruments and everything work out. And so we've had to stay, you know, by far primarily focused on that. There's sacrifices we have to make to do this sort of new exploration and to take this chance on this little helicopter. And we have to set aside a portion of what would otherwise be, you know, core Mars 2020, Mars sample return related science. But I'll tell you, I am very

excited about the possibilities that this might offer for future exploration and be able to do missions where you don't have to worry about some of the things, you know, that Katie mentioned, and planning that road trip. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of human minds and technology to plan drives around rocks and sand and so forth. And so I'm imagining a day in the future where there's some sort of base station and one or more of these drones just flying out, flying search patterns and taking images and spectra systematically with actually very little human input in terms of the planning. And in a sense, these missions are zero sum games in that the time you spend, and you know, one of the engineers I love it says the brain calories,

the brain calories you spend on this thing, you don't spend on the other thing. And where this thing is planning our way around rocks and sand dunes, and this other thing is looking at science data and interpreting it and running it through scientific minds, it's great to find ways that we can shift the balance more towards that other side and let the scientists focus on the science. So I can imagine great possibilities. So it'll be really exciting to see how Ingenuity does. Katie, you want to add anything to that? Can you see a day when we might have little whirlybirds all over the red planet? Yes, and I'm an image person. I study images of Mars from our orbiters and on the ground,

and the great potential of something like a helicopter is the ability to fill this gap between our orbiter images and our surface images, and giving us really that bird's eye view of the surface of Mars that can be so helpful when trying to plan science or just thinking about the partnership between a rover and a helicopter and the kind of exploration you could do there in the future for future missions. And so that's one aspect of the helicopter that I'm excited about thinking ahead to how future missions could use this technology, Because we're always operating at the limits of resolution, especially when it comes to our orbiter images. And I'm one of those folks

who's always trying to tease out everything from the orbiter images. So having a helicopter be able to fly out and give you that intermediate scale has so much potential for how you think about planning a mission. And so that's an element that I'm really excited about. And I anticipate, well, we'll take images with ingenuity. And we that's an element that I'm really excited about. And I anticipate, well, we'll take images with ingenuity and we're very excited to see those images and see what we can learn from them. Lots of great science to come, obviously. Spectacular engineering being exhibited every day. But as we've all been told so many times, and you guys have taken so much to heart, it's largely about sample return.

So I noted just a few days ago, NASA awarded a contract to build a little rocket. I think it's going to be a little two-stage rocket that someday is going to get handed those precious sample tubes that Perseverance is going to spend the next months and years collecting and bring them back home. Does it start to sound, Katie, a little more real, like we're actually headed toward achieving this?

Oh, yes. And every bit of news we get like that, I think is just so great to hear, because for a long time, sample return hung out there as this possibility, this potential. For a long time, sample return hung out there as this possibility, this potential. And now we're seeing the actual contracts get put in place and the steps, the planning steps actually leading us to Mars sample return. And it really helps us and the Perseverance team feel like what we're doing is really a reality in terms of feeding into Mars sample return. So it's great to hear that news and to see NASA's commitment to making Mars sample return happen. And on the Perseverance team, we're ready to be that first step of Mars sample return. Ken, when you were on a panel that I had at PlanetFest, I said, it seems that we have gone from follow the water to find the life, that we've actually now officially made that transition.

And you agreed with me. I assume you still feel that way. I'd love to see if you have anything to add to that. I agree, absolutely. Certainly, the previous Mars rover missions had fantastic capabilities that could be used to detect signs of life. But in my view, this is the most serious that NASA has been about directly seeking signs of ancient life since the Viking mission. There's another thing that I think is true, and it's that Mars 2020 and Mars sample return offers the best opportunity. I'll say potentially the best opportunity, because who knows, but certainly one of, if not the best opportunity to find evidence of life beyond Earth in our lifetime. So there are a number of other approaches that NASA and other, you know, scientific entities around the world are taking. We have the icy worlds, the ocean worlds, someday getting beneath the ice on Europa or Enceladus. And then there's extrasolar planets, enormous telescopes that can read the

spectra of distant atmospheres or planets around other suns. But a lot of that stuff is so technologically challenging that it's quite a ways off, but does offer great opportunities. You know, Mars sample return has been that so technologically challenging that it's who knows when it could happen. But here we are. We're right in the middle of it. The thing that struck me was when we got those first Watson images of the sampling system of the ACA, the adaptive caching assembly, on the surface of Mars, beautiful and pristine, ready to go. And I was just blown away. beautiful and pristine, ready to go. And I was just blown away. I mean, the number of things that had to go right to have us here in position with sample tubes ready to go, a drill apparently

ready to go to fill those tubes. We're really close to truly revolutionary science. Pretty darn exciting. Katie, I mean, is that what's on the wall now? Is it replace, follow the water, find the life? I do agree with that statement. And something that I think a lot about, and especially with my experiences on curiosity as well, I mean, obviously the bar has to be very high for making a statement about the discovery of a potential biosignature. And I think the Curiosity mission has been very careful in how they frame habitability and potential biosignatures.

And the way I see it from our 2020 and perseverance is that we have to be more bold. Of course, the bar is still very high for us, but because we are truly collecting those samples and we're making decisions about samples that we think have the best potential for containing signs of ancient life, we have to be bold about that decision-making and incompetent in our interpretation of the samples as a potential holder of these signs of ancient life. And so we can't be shy about that because that's what this mission is all about. And that's the core of this mission.

So I think there's a difference in the boldness there in our approach to that seeking signs of ancient life that previous missions just haven't really gone there and we're going there. The rewards go to the bold. That's a great point, Matt. I mean, I'll just actually echo what Katie said. It's a fantastic point and it's a real theme of our mission. Your listeners may not be aware, but scientists, you know, this really is sticking your neck out to make these extraordinary claims or even not to make them, but to just wade into those waters. Katie said MSL has been really careful. That's a natural property.

A natural characteristic of scientists is to be very careful, very skeptical, and challenge everything, right? And it's how science moves forward. But as Katie said, we have to stick our necks out in order to authentically be seeking the signs of life. We have to stick our necks out in a way that previous missions have not. You know, they've had their focus on these other things. You know, for us, we know we're landing, we know there was water, you know, we know we're landing in a habitable, a formerly habitable environment. We've got to take that next step. And it's going to take some, you know, some guts from our science team to be able to authentically make that leap. And so it'll

be exciting to see how all that goes. You said it, extraordinary claims. Let's find that extraordinary evidence. And it just strikes me how this is the culmination, how you, all of us, are standing on the shoulders of explorers going back, maybe even before Mariner 4, but certainly on those who did Viking and Sojourner and Spirit and Opportunity, to say nothing of Curiosity. Bolder and bolder, and here we are. And you said it as a culmination, but this is also the start of Mars sample return. And we've got so much more to come in terms of making Mars sample return happen. So Perseverance is positioned at a very interesting nexus, I think, in Mars exploration, standing on the shoulders of giants, yet so much to come and so much incredible engineering and science still to come.

Okay. So back down here on Earth, as we speak, it's been about a month, a month of Earth days. I've got you up in the middle of the day, taking time out from doing science on Mars. Are the two of you on Mars time? Yes. You know, I'm on a, I'm on kind of a hybrid Mars time, I would say, because I have two young kids and they don't respect the Mars time calendar. And so, you know, I, I liken it to, to, to having a newborn and can you, you can, you can sympathize with this as well, where I found in the first couple of weeks when we were on this out of phase schedule that, you know, I was just catching hours when I could. And somehow in some total, it was enough to keep me a functioning human being.

But it was very different from my curiosity experience where I very religiously followed Mars time. But I'm just trying to make it work with my constraints and circumstances at home. I wake up at odd hours and Ken does too. And we dial in. But kind of just keeping it together on the home front too. Yeah, it's very similar for me. And I have a three and a half year old daughter, but I will say hats off to Katie and the other moms on the team. It's often the case, as much as we try to do everything we can, it's often the case that the moms have to carry a different kind of load at

home than the dad. It's the case in my house. You know, there's certain things that my daughter Dorothy can really only get or only wants from mom, you know, and so it's really amazing. It was very much for me also like the months after my daughter was born. This whole thing has been, that's been the closest analogy for me. And it's this funny, whatever, eight month cruise period of sort of the, there's this strange gestation happening where the landing event is very similar, not as similar, you know, or, or Katie might think about it differently, but, um, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't have the painful part, but, but it's the, the excitement, intensity, stress, and lack of control. It's so important and vital and so special, and there's so much potential, but there's nothing I can do on, but family and Mars, you know, and it's been really nice actually to be able to set some of the other things aside and just sleep when I can and look at Mars pictures when I can't, you know, and dance around with Dorothy whenever, whenever I'm not doing either of those two things. It's great. It's a really special time.

I'm not doing either of those two things. It's great. It's a really special time. This little one, this toddler, seems to be doing awfully well on Mars. You are the deputy project scientist. Is there a natural division in the tasks that you take on? Or is it whatever the project scientist says, hey, you, go do this? I mean, how do you split it up? You know, it's a combination of both of those things because Ken and I each have our areas

and our expertise. And I'm coming, I was born and raised in the Mars science community. And so I'm coming from that. And I worked on Curiosity for many years now. And I worked on rover images is kind of my thing and doing geologic mapping on Mars. And so I've been very comfortable with that side of things. Also, I love operations. I love thinking about how scientists work in the framework of a rover mission.

And so those tend to be some of the things that I pick up. And Ken has his experiences as an astrobiologist and focus on the Mars sample return side of things. And he can speak to that. Sometimes we have a very natural division of tasks. And then other times it's, oh, this thing popped up. One of us has to take it. Who's got time? And then sometimes it is, you know, Ken Farley, who's our project scientist saying, you know, hey, Ken, can you take this? Hey, Katie, can you take this? And then we certainly do what Ken asks us to do. So I think

it's a combination of those things. And I'll let Ken give his perspective too. The way I think about it is that we make this actually fantastic three-part team with Ken, Katie, and me. And we all, all three of us bring different, very important parts to the whole. And so Ken Farley and I are both geochemists, but we're actually very different types of geochemists. So one of the divisions we make for Mars 2020 and Mars sample return is between astrobiology and planetary evolution. So how did Mars evolve as a solid planet? How did it form? How old is it? How old are different parts of it. Astrobiology, obviously, you know, were the conditions there suitable for the origin of life, emergence of life? Did life emerge, you know,

were environments habitable, etc. One uses different sets of chemical techniques to ask those different types of questions. And Ken is much more focused on those planetary evolution types of geochemistry and geochronology, analyzing the measuring the ages of things and so forth. In fact, he led the first measurement of the age of something on another planet with MSL. Fantastic achievement. And I'm more on the astrobiology side with organic and what we would call light stable isotope geochemistry, the kinds of elements and molecules associated with life and low temperature environments where life likes to hang out.

And then when it comes to Mars geology, so Ken and I both have done almost all of our work on old earth rocks. And we continue to do research on that sort of thing. Katie, as she said was born and bred a Mars planetary scientist has done a lot of great work on Earth rocks as well in analogs. But when it comes to Mars rocks and mapping the landing site, you see that big, beautiful map behind Katie. She and colleagues put that together and Katie led the mapping effort of our landing site. When it comes to understanding how Mars rocks fit together, Katie's definitely

the expert there. And so it makes a really, I think, a really powerful leadership trio that we can bounce ideas back and forth and hold those different perspectives as we move into this mission, but also Mars sample return that is important to so many different types of scientists, including, you know, we sort of represent, I would say, the major categories of those different scientists who will be really interested to look at those samples. So it worked out really well. To say nothing to the rest of the team behind this amazing rover.

Katie, I bet as another geologist, if you could be up there with a hand lens and a little pickaxe, you wish you could do that? Bring those rocks back yourself? Absolutely not. rocks you wish you could do that bring those rocks back yourself absolutely not you know this is everyone is always surprised by my answer but you know a lot of folks went into planetary science and planetary geology because they wanted to be astronauts that was not me i i visited the national air and space museum as an elementary school kid and i said at the time this is actually around the time Pathfinder landed, and they had an exhibit there. And I said, you know what, I want to do something like that. So I never wanted to be an astronaut. In my mind, maybe I'm too risk averse. That is a whole

different set of skills and a mental fortitude that I don't think that I have. And so I'm perfectly happy to be planted here on Earth, working through our robotic explorers. That being said, there are certainly times when I look at a rover image and I think, oh, man, if only we could just walk around the other side of that outcrop or if we could just, you know, kind of jog over there. But each one of those things requires a lot of planning when you're working through a robotic geologist or astrobiologist. And so there are certainly times when I wish that we could put humans up there to do the job the rover is doing. But for me personally, I like being here on Earth, appreciating the beautiful planet we live on, but looking through the eyes of a robotic explorer. Ken, just briefly, I can't remember if I asked you, I mean, if a billionaire came up and said, hey, you want a ticket to Mars and I'll bring you home too, would you say yes? I would not. I would go into space in a heartbeat,

but I would not take a trip to Mars now that my daughter has been born. That has changed the entire calculus. Before that, I probably would have, but not anymore. Earth has become much more beautiful than it was before. Thank you so much, both of you. Congratulations once again to you, to Ken Farley, your boss, to the entire team. Just know that there are going to be hundreds of thousands, millions of us out here, certainly all the membership of the Planetary Society and listeners to this show, who are going to be following on every word and every image and now every sound.

Keep up the great work, and let's find out more about Jezero Crater and what might once have lived there, if we're lucky. Thanks again. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Matt. Katie Stack Morgan and Ken Williford are the Deputy Project Scientists for Perseverance, the Mars 2020 rover that is now rolling across Jezero Crater. I'll be right back with Bruce.

Space exploration doesn't just happen. In a democracy where you're competing against other priorities and resources, we need to maintain a constant engagement in the political process to ensure the types of missions we want to see in the future. I'm Casey Dreyer. I'm the chief advocate here at the Planetary Society. I'm asking you to consider making a donation to our program of space policy and advocacy that works every single day to promote your values in space science and exploration to the people who make the decisions in our democracy. Your donations keep us independent,

keep us engaged, and keep us effective. Go to planetary.org slash take action. That's planetary.org slash take action. Thank you. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. That's Bruce Betts. We're going to have some fun talking about the night sky and giving some more stuff away. Welcome. Woo-hoo! We've got Mars in the evening sky, still slowly fading, but looking like a bright reddish star in the south,

over to the right of Aldebaran, the reddish star in Taurus. And you can see that in the early evening south and southwest. And in the pre-dawn, we've got still low down, but getting higher and higher, super bright Jupiter, and to its upper right, you will see yellowish Saturn. And that's night sky, so I'm just going to go on to this week in space history. Why not? 1974, Mariner 10 completed the first ever flyby of the planet Mercury. 2004, Mariner 10 completed the first ever flyby of the planet Mercury. In 2001, the fiery re-entry of the Mir space station 20 years ago this week.

On to... Oh, my pretty. The mass of... No. The mass of plutonium powering the Perseverance rover at 4.8 kilograms is approximately the same as the mass of our entire LightSail 2 spacecraft. Wow. I mean, you could pick just about any piece of Perseverance and it would be the mass of our entire spacecraft.

By the way, I thought of the book or the movie that you were just doing the trailer for was Gollum, the Underwater Adventure was Gollum, the underwater adventure. Gollum, Gollum, water. That was terrible. Let's move on to the trivia contest. That'll be precious. What was the original name? I asked you, what was the original name of the Mars InSight mission?

How did we do, Matt? I have it for you in verse from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild in Kansas. Great response, by the way. Thank you, everybody. And lots of wonderful messages. I am so far behind on replying to those of you who include a nice little note. Please believe I read all of them and mark them carefully so I can reply. I just haven't for a while.

So what can I say? I've been lazy. But here's Dave Fairchild's contribution. Originally, its name was GEMS, a shining nomenclature. It brought a small seismometer to spy on Martian nature. But JPL decided that another name was better. So in its correspondence, you'll see Insight signs the letter. I'm betting that's correct because that's what everybody, almost everybody came up with.

That is indeed correct. I even have the explanation for that acronym here. Here it is expanded. In another little ditty, this one from Ola Franzen, our fan in Sweden, one of many actually, sent by a spacefaring nation was a mission with a two-year duration. one of many actually, sent by a spacefaring nation was a mission with a two-year duration. At the time of flight, it was known as InSight, changed from the Geophysical Monitoring Station. Nice.

That was a great acronym, GEMS. We did get an explanation for why it was changed from Pavel Kumesha in Belarus. He said it was changed because GEMS was reserved for another mission, Gravity and Extreme Magnetism, SMEX, which stood for Small Explorer, yet another example of acronym inside an acronym, says Pavel. But then that one got canceled. So I guess Insight could have ended up as GEMS? It's a gem of an insight they've provided right there. How about this from Robert Klain? He said they should have named it the Seismic and Geophysical Assessment Nexus. Got it?

Sagan. Oh, like Carl Sagan. And another one from Mel Powell in California. Ironic that the mission would have included that mole that was supposed to dig down because as a name, Geophysical Monitoring Station is boring. Here's our winner. And he is a previous winner, but it's been three and a half years since Kevin Nitka last got the nod from Random.org. Kevin, congratulations.

He's in New Jersey and he has won himself a Planetary Society rubber asteroid with the correct answer that InSight was once known as GEMS. Congratulations, Kevin. Congratulations. Ready for a new contest? No, I have a poem for you. Hear from Gene Lewin in Washington. Celestial diamonds, a lunar pearl, an agate's anti-cyclonic storm, cabochons seen on clear dark nights along with faceted interstellar forms. So a gem was sent to the ruby orb, renamed Insight by the NASA group, with HP Cube, known as the mole, to act as our distant loop. Some pretty good puns today. Loop as in jeweler's loop.

Yeah, nice. Now, please, let's go on. Here's your question. What part of the International Space Station is named after a chess piece? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I'll have to check, mate. I don't know the answer to this one. Oh, nice.

Too far? No, just far enough. You got until Wednesday, March 31st, 8 a.m. Pacific time, Wednesday, March 31st, to get us the answer to this one. Let's send you another book, one of those that has been arriving at our office that I really do hope to visit before too long. This is one we've talked about before. It's Spacefarers from Christopher Wanjek, a great little book, How Humans Will Settle the Moon, Mars, and Beyond. I recommend it, and it might be yours if you get the winning answer in. We're done.

All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about when in your regular life you could appropriately use the phrase, checkmate. Thank you. Good night. Wouldn't be chess. I think I gave that up when I was about 12. I'm just not big on board games games to the eternal disappointment of my wife. But hey, I would pick it up again for the chief scientist.

Do you play chess, Bruce? Please do. I've been getting back into it during the pandemic lockdowns, as many people have. So come join us. And it's more than a board game. Okay, so you're actually probably pretty good at it. And I know you're very competitive. I think I'm going to be busy that year. He's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up.

Checkmate! Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its astro Biogeochemical members. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Ad Astra.