Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Third Time's the Charm for Dan McCleese and the Mars Climate Sounder

Episode Date: February 27, 2006

Mars Climate Sounder Principal Investigator Dan McCleese on instrument's third chance to reach the red planet, on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How you'll soon check the weather on Mars, 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. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is about to join the crowd at the Red Planet. Among its instruments is a camera that should be able to pick out details on the surface as small as a beach ball.

And wouldn't that be an interesting find? Emily will tell us more about MRO's cameras in our Q&A segment. Our guest this week also has an instrument on the new spacecraft, but it's not a camera. Dan McLeese is behind the Mars Climate Sounder. It promises to deliver unprecedented reports about the weather and climate on that windy planet, and it's the third attempt to get the MCS to Mars.

Dan will explain in just a couple of minutes. Later, Bruce Betts will eclipse his past performances on What's Up as he presents yet another chance to win an Explorer's Guide to Mars poster. In our news this week is a story Alan Stern couldn't share with us last week. A team led by the New Horizons Principal Investigator and Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab has discovered that three of Pluto's moons, including Charon, were probably created in a single cataclysmic impact with the planet. Their paper is published in the February 23 issue of Nature, but you can also read about it in an article by my colleague Amir Alexander at Planetary.org.

NASA's hurricane-damaged facility near New Orleans, Louisiana, has just shipped out the external tank for the next space shuttle flight. Now on its way by barge to the Kennedy Space Center, the huge structure will be mated to Discovery as it prepares for launch no sooner than May of this year. Lastly, you can swing by Emily Lakdawalla's blog at planetary.org for a fresh update from Cassini. The Saturn orbiting spacecraft is once again swung by Titan. Emily's February 27 entry includes some of the beautiful images just snapped, along with a way cool animation of little Hyperion rotating.

Speaking of Emily, and speaking of MRO, here she is. I'll be right back with Dan McLeese. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, How do the imaging resolutions of all of the Mars spacecraft differ? Every camera that's been sent to Mars has a different resolution. The spatial resolution of a camera is usually measured in terms of the size of one picture element or pixel in a digital image. The Viking orbiters, which arrived at Mars in 1976, captured images of the entire surface at a pixel resolution of 150 to 300 meters. The next successful orbiter to arrive was Mars Global Surveyor, or MGS, in 1997.

Its camera has achieved pixel resolutions of 1 to 4 meters, and it has actually been able to spot most of the Mars landers sitting on the surface. However, this high resolution comes at a price. Even after nearly nine years in orbit, it has still imaged only a few percent of the Martian surface, and the Viking orbiter maps are still used to place the MGS images in context. The next spacecraft, Mars Odyssey, is working on creating a global map of Mars with a resolution intermediate between Viking and MGS. But soon, a spacecraft will arrive at Mars that will be able to achieve all of these things at once.

Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out more. Mars Climate Sounder Principal Investigator Dan McLeese and his Jet Propulsion Lab team began designing and building the first generation instrument back in 1986. They got their first shot at the red planet with the Mars Observer in 1993. It disappeared. They rebuilt the MCS for the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. It crashed. Now he is chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at JPL, but Dan has never given up his dream of getting the MCS to the Red Planet. He made time to talk with us as he anxiously awaits arrival of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in just a few days. Dan, thanks for joining us on Planetary Radio.

It's my pleasure. I suppose you are thinking right now that the third time's the charm. Well, I certainly am. My team here in the UK and everybody who's interested in the Mars climate has their fingers crossed very firmly. As I understand it, your instrument and you as principal investigator, you are the only ones to ever go through this two strikes down situation and still have a third opportunity to get your instrument to the red planet. Yeah, I'm afraid that's true. still have a third opportunity to get your instrument to the red planet.

Yeah, I'm afraid that's true. We launched our instrument the very first time in 1992 on the Mars Observer spacecraft. It was a group of late 20, early 30-year-olds. We went off with the idea to build this instrument in about 1985, and we got our first chance to launch in 92, and unfortunately, three days from the planet, we lost the instrument. And then it happened again. Yeah, we were given the opportunity to make a case to refly the instrument, which would have meant that we would rebuild it, build it according to blueprints.

And we won, and we decided to go ahead. And NASA funded us again, and we rebuilt, and we flew it on the Mars Climate Orbiter. Actually, just the name demonstrates the central position of the instrument in that mission. And then we plowed that spacecraft into the planet. So two strikes. So here's your third shot. It certainly looks good as we look at the mission right now. Only about a week, a bit more than a week, as we speak from orbital insertion.

Am I correct? Is everything looking good? Well, I think there's two ways to answer that. One is we're now 50 years old, so it's a little less boyish activity. But, yes, from a hardware, software, and flying perspective, the spacecraft MRO is flying beautifully. You make it sound like some part of your team has been with you this whole time. Oh, yes.

In fact, we've had a few of our investigators all the way along. That's a little more than 20 years. Unfortunately, we've lost a few to various forms of illness over time, and a couple of us have retired. So we're just now working with NASA to repopulate those missing positions with some young people. We're all ready to go. We've been working with this team now, rebuilding, for four years. As it happens, our Q&A segment today with Emily Lakdawalla is also talking about MRO and talking about the incredible collection of cameras on that orbiter.

Your instrument is going to do something else altogether. Could you talk a little bit about what it's going to deliver back to us here on Earth? Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about making measurements of another planet's weather and climate. You know, the experiment itself that we're flying is based on some of the latest technology that's used for weather satellites that orbit the Earth. We're, in this case, redesigning those parts of the instrument, but putting them together into a system that looks down on the planet and out to the limb of the atmosphere. Now, I'll just pause for a second to say that the limb is the edge of the atmosphere

that you see when you're looking out of your window from an airplane. And by looking at the edge of the atmosphere from our instrument, we can actually obtain profiles or points from the surface out to space. And by observing the infrared radiation that comes naturally from the atmosphere in those views, we will be able to determine the temperature of the atmosphere, a component that is obviously measured from Earth meteorology satellites. It will be able to make measurements of water vapor in the atmosphere, dust, although that's not a major interest for the Earth. It is a profoundly important thing for Mars and its meteorology. And also clouds, whereas on Earth they're water ice or liquid water,

on Mars they can be ice and they are either water or CO2 ice. So that's the range of the observations that we can make and a little bit about how the measurements themselves are made. Well, pick one of those cases, like water vapor or humidity. How do you use infrared sensing to tell you how much moisture there is in the atmosphere of Mars? It's a challenge to do this from a long distance away. You know, if you imagine a weather station, then you have a hygrometer, and you're physically in contact with the gases.

The challenge of doing it from orbit is fairly obvious. You can't touch any part of the atmosphere from an altitude of about 200 kilometers above the surface. So what we do is we look at the heat spectrum, the fingerprint, if you will, of the light that is emitted by water vapor at wavelengths that are around 30 microns. And that means that this is very deep infrared. And water vapor at these wavelengths has a fingerprint which is unique. And we can observe where that fingerprint is prominent and determine the amount of the water that's in the atmosphere.

It's not exactly just a measurement of the brightness, if you will, of the water telling you exactly how much there is. The temperature of the atmosphere makes that signature bright or dim, as well as the abundance of the water in the atmosphere making it bright or dim. More makes it brighter, less makes it less bright, but so does temperature have that effect. So we have to retrieve or unravel temperature and water with the instrument's observations in order to get the water out. I thought it might be a little bit more of a challenge to tease apart that data once you get it back. Well, what I've just said takes about a year of work, we're estimating. We put most of our team members on this particular problem, and it's a problem that's been worked on since the 50s in Earth remote sensing, and yet it is the primary input to weather forecasting models on Earth.

Infrared observations of temperature and water vapor and clouds through this process of unscrambling infrared information. Principal Investigator Dan McLeese will tell us more about the Mars Climate Sounder and what to expect from it when we return in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. 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

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. Our guest is the Jet Propulsion Lab's Chief Scientist for Mars Exploration. Dan McLeese is also Principal Investigator for the Mars Climate Sounder Instrument, arriving at the Red Planet on March 10th. The MCS will actually

be looking at this infrared return from the atmosphere of Mars in nine different ranges. Yeah, each of the constituents of the atmosphere, an example being water, has a fingerprint that uniquely defines it. that uniquely defines it, and our nine channels pick up the fingerprints of the pieces of the atmosphere, the constituents, if you will, that we're interested in. And so among others, there's the dust and the clouds and, of course, the measurement of temperature itself. How does your instrument fit into this rather amazing collection of other instruments and cameras carried by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter? Well, I think it's fair to say that is both reflected from the surface, originating at the sun, and also emitted from the surface.

It carries the camera that you've been mentioning that has a resolution at the surface that's better than a foot. It's about 30 centimeters. And there's also a shallow ice sensing radar on board. But all of these together, including the MCS, are focusing on something that we like to call follow the water. And this is a characteristic of studying the planet, which we came up with as NASA grew interested in the late 90s in trying to find life on the planet. There was a real outpouring of interest in NASA and in various other parts of the public engagement in what NASA does. Because of the findings in the Allen Hills meteorite suggestive of life.

The administrator of NASA at the time said, I want scientists to go to Mars and find life. This concerned us a little bit because that same kind of experiment had been tried by the Viking landers in about 1976, and we had not found even organic molecules on the surface. The surface was quite sterile. So the science community, of which at the time I was one of the members most vocal in this regard, said, you know, we don't think that the right next step is to look for life.

We need better to understand whether or not the planet was ever habitable. And we've related habitability of Mars in the past and today to the presence or absence of water. So if you think of follow the water, you're really searching for evidence of water persistent on the surface over time where life might have got a foothold. We said at the outset that you are chief scientist of Mars exploration, the Mars exploration program at JPL. I would guess that with the success of following the water on Mars and much of that success due to instruments built at JPL,

you must be pretty pleased with what your colleagues there have accomplished. Oh, it's true. We've had a marvelous decade. We have, at present, at Mars, we have four spacecraft in orbit, two on the surface. It's a remarkable set of investigations that are being conducted. And the kinds of investigations that we at JPL and people around the world are now flying span the entire spectrum of trying to understand whether the planet was habitable. And the data that comes back does not just show us, yep, we were right in our thinking about what Mars is.

We are struggling to understand some of the things we've found. We are truly surprised by this new planet that is emerging from the data. And it is a fascinating place to visit with much more in store and a better look at it that Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is going to deliver than we've ever had from orbit. Talk to us as we get close to running out of time here about how you will be sharing information with the public, data that is returned by the Mars Climate Sounder. And I believe that's a role that the Planetary Society will have a part in.

Yes, outreach, taking our information and putting it in front of the public is very important to us. And, yes, the Planetary Society will be utilizing their resources. They are a member of our team, and we're going to be seeing that on their website. Our data will be distributed through the Planetary Society. We hope that some questions will come from the Society's members as well. How soon after orbital insertion, scheduled for February 10, excuse me, March 10 as we speak, not just scheduled, I mean it's not as if you have a choice in that, it will be March 10. It'll happen one way or the other. How soon after that will we start to see data from the Mars Climate Sounder, and for that matter from the other instruments on this orbiter?

Well, we're fortunate enough to be able to turn on our instrument in the very early portion of the mission, at the time when the instrument is very, very far from the planet, before we come in closer. So we are going to have data on the 15th, and that will be our first look at Mars. Well, Dan, we will look forward to that. Of course, this radio program will be

covering orbital insertion and the data that follows, and we're expecting some pretty amazing material to emerge from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and from your instrument, the Mars Climate Sounder. Thanks again for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you, Matt. Dan McLeese is Chief Scientist of the Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California, and that's where he's speaking to us from today. He is also principal investigator for the Mars Climate Sounder, getting its third shot at the red planet as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter enters orbit around Mars on March 10, 2006. We'll be right back with Bruce Batts and this week's edition of What's Up

right after this return visit from Emily and a bit more about MRO. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A. Mars has been imaged from orbit by many spacecraft at varying resolutions, but none has observed Mars in more ways at once than Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will. MRO will enter Mars orbit on March 10th, and it carries three cameras for imaging Mars at different scales.

The Mars Color Imager, or MARSI, will gather daily global color images to monitor the climate and weather. The Context Imager will provide images at pretty high resolutions of 8 meters per pixel, small enough to spot objects the size of houses. But the standout camera on MRO will be the one called HiRISE. HiRISE pixels will be an unbelievably tiny half meter wide, which is small enough to spot objects the size of rovers or even missing landers. Finally, there is an instrument on MRO that blurs the distinctions between cameras and spectrometers.

The Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM for short, will take images at lower resolutions than HiRISE, but will take them in as many as 500 different colors at once, permitting an incredibly detailed survey of the varying compositions of rocks and soils on the surface. 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 he's going to tell us all about what's up in the night sky. And I bet he'll have a new trivia contest question for us. Oh, that would be a good idea, wouldn't it? Yeah. How the heck are you? Do well. I'll have one by the end of the show.

And it will be Olympian in its extent. I can hear the gears turning in your vast brain, your vast and powerful brain. And we'll do radio at the same time. It's amazing. It is. It's multitasking of the highest and most beautiful and perfect level ever witnessed by humankind. Truly Olympian. I'm honored to be here with you.

And I'm honored to share my brain with you. Let's also share what's up in my sky. Tastes like chicken. Oh! Okay. To bring us back, I'm going to have to pull out a penumbral lunar eclipse. Penumbral? Penumbral.

Penumbral. I thought it was penumbra, penumbral. Penumbral, penumbral. Let's call the whole thing off. You have to really pay attention for these. I don't find them too exciting, but I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't let you know that on March 14th, there is a penumbral lunar eclipse that will be visible throughout most of the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia,

with kind of Europe and Africa having the best view from beginning to end. So the deep shadow Earth casts is called the umbra. Umbra. And the one around the outside edge where you're still catching a lot of sunlight but you've partially blocked the sun is the penumbra. And the moon is passing through the penumbral part of the shadow. What is interesting and makes it unusual, I think it only happens five times this century, is it will pass completely within the penumbra without touching the umbra.

Exciting, isn't it? I'm sorry, I don't mean to feign excitement. That's actually pretty interesting. It is. So if you want information, in fact, we should probably post a link to it. NASA has a very nice eclipses page. Good idea. Let me make a note of that. All right.

They will give you information about time. And once again, basically, we won't be able to see anything, Matt. So if you're on the West Coast of North America, you're bumming. But other than that, you're in good shape. Someday. Someday. Yeah, March 29th, by the way, and we'll talk about this more later, total solar eclipse. Totally.

Dude. But if you haven't planned for that one yet, you're probably not seeing it. Yeah. Except on the web. All right, let's move on to this week in space history. It is the 40th anniversary of the Venera 3 impact. When we say impact, they didn't mean that, but it was supposed to be a Soviet Venus lander that they lost contact with. But apparently, they do think it hit the atmosphere, therefore making it.

And here is your rainbow space fact. Snuck that one in. I did. I'm combining the two just to mix things up a little bit. Venera 3 has the distinction of being the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet. Sort of. All right.

All right. Yeah, it reached it, yeah. We have no confirmation of that. Yeah, we'll go look. Commonly, according to Soviet doctrine, it reached the surface. Yeah, according to Soviet doctrine, and planted a little flag as well, I'm sure. Exactly. A little cotton flag.

All right, let's go on to a trivia contest. And we asked you, how many data-gathering flybys of Mercury did Mariner 10 complete? Mariner 10, the first and only spacecraft to have visited Mercury. How'd we do, Matt? Just a few. I think it was like one person who said that the answer was two. No, I'm afraid not. Not only did Mariner 10 make three flybys of Mercury,

it also had one of Venus, right? It sure did. It was the first spacecraft ever. Little bonus random space fact. First spacecraft ever to go by two different planets. Bonus space fact. There you go. Jeffrey Williams knew all this stuff.

He got to us from his home in Ilford, Essex, England, close to London, he put in parentheses. And sure enough, had it right. He mentioned the flyby of Venus in February of 1974. And then three times, March and September of 74 and March of 75, flying past Mercury, returning what? Still the only pictures, close-ups we've got of that planet. That is true until Messenger gets there and starts doing flybys in 2008. It also will fly by Venus, but it eventually will orbit if all goes well, whereas this was this weird geometry that just showed us three flybys,

but all on the same side of the planet. So we're still missing half of Mercury. We'll pick it up from Messenger. Jeffrey, you're going to get an Explorer's Guide to Mars poster, and I bet we're going to give away another one right now. Let's do it. If you can answer this question, I have to. This is a little challenging to present,

but I had to do something in honor of the Winter Olympics going on as we record this. What is the connection between the location of the Winter Olympics and near-Earth object impact threats? Oh, I know, I know, I know. Well, don't answer. You're not eligible. How many times do I have to tell you this? And this has a lot to do with a controversy that has been mentioned in regard to the Winter Olympics, actually.

I won't go farther than that because that would give too much away. But, yes, there has been a controversy regarding this very thing. Really? It constitutes your question for this week. I haven't been watching enough. No, it's absolutely true. Go to planetary.org slash radio, whether you're in or out of the controversy, and find out how to send us your answer and try to win an Explorer's Guide to Mars poster.

Get it to us by March 6th, Monday, March 6th, 2 p.m. Pacific time. We'll make sure that you are in there in the random drawing, assuming that you have the correct answer, for the next Explorer's Guide to Mars poster that we'll give away on What's Up. All right, everybody, go out there, look up. But wait, how's that class going? Class is going wonderfully. People can still jump in because all the classes are archived.

So I am indeed teaching an Introduction to Astronomy and Planetary Science class through California State University, Dominguez Hills. You can go to planetary.org slash special slash bets class to find out how you can tune in either live over the Internet or if you're in Southern California on TV, or you can watch the archives. There you go. It's going well. We just talked about asteroids.

We're going to be talking about the moon. That's coming up next lecture. Great. Next lecture, we're talking about the moon. Then we're moving on and starting our planetary tour, one planet at a time. Well, join the tour, everybody. Join the class. And join us next week for another edition of What's Up.

But first, good night, Bruce. Oh, good night, Matt. I mean, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about that white noise in the back of your brain. Thank you, and good night. You know about that? Bruce Betts. And I'm exposing it on the radio, Matt.

Oh, my God. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he does join us every week here for What's Up. Join us next week for a special report on Europa. We'll hear from planetary scientist Chris McKay and others about why we need to find out what's in that salty ocean under the Jupiter moon's ice. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.