Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Zooming In On Mars With Mastcam-Z

Episode Date: September 1, 2015

Planetary Radio talks with Jim Bell and Justin Maki, leaders of the development team for the most advanced camera ever planned for the surface of Mars.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Zooming in on the Red Planet, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It promises to be the best camera, actually two cameras, ever placed on the surface of Mars. We'll talk with Jim Bell and Justin Mackey about its creation. of Mars. We'll talk with Jim Bell and Justin Mackey about its creation. Bill Nye agrees with an astronaut that Mars is a great place to explore and a crappy place to live. Bruce Betts will bounce back for a look at the night sky and a new What's Up Space Trivia contest. We'll start with senior editor Emily Lakdawalla. She's here to share her blog about mind-blowing views of Pluto that come

from outside NASA and the professional world of science. Well, what we're looking at in this blog entry are three different videos produced by space enthusiasts using the New Horizons LORRI image data that they released from the Pluto encounter in July. Each of these has its own charm. one, though, is especially cool because, as you point out, you could actually see Pluto being rocked back and forth in its orbit by that other body, its sister up there. That's right. Matthew Earle is a programmer. He wrote a Python script that aligns all of these optical navigation images on background stars. And when you do that, when you hold the star reference frame fixed, you actually can see how Charon tugs Pluto around and around with it as the two mutually orbit their barycenter. And you can also see the

proper motion of Pluto and Charon against the background stars as New Horizons flies past it. That's actually the motion of New Horizons you're really seeing, but it's very cool. So the barycenter, the center of gravity, which is actually out in space, not within Pluto. Yeah, and that makes the Pluto-Sharon system really a binary system, a truly binary one where there's no single dominant object. The point that they're both orbiting around is outside both of them. All right, a couple of words about this middle one from Bjorn Johnson. Well, Bjorn has been doing just amazing work with outer planet images for a really long time,

and he's particularly fascinated with trying to simulate the effects of atmosphere on our views of planets. What would it look like if we were, say, looking at Saturn's rings through the sky of Saturn? And here he was particularly interested in the way that Pluto's atmosphere lights up, makes a ring around it as New Horizons flew past. And so he actually simulated that using the kinds of functions to understand Pluto's atmosphere that the scientists are no doubt using right now to try to understand what the same picture tells us about Pluto's atmosphere. So it's a nice parallel of the scientific and artistic process. Bjorn had a more artistic goal in mind while the scientists are, of course, trying to figure out what those pictures tell us about Pluto's atmosphere.

With all due respect to Matthew Earle and Bjorn Johnson, my jaw dropped when I saw this last one. Tell us about it. Yeah, so this is a Russian guy named Gennady Ianov, and he is interested in trying to make this more dramatic feeling of New Horizons flying past Pluto and Charon, and also simulating the point of view of the LORRI camera by swinging the camera point of view along the LORRI camera by swinging the camera point of view along with LORRI's. And so we get this much more cinematic approach to the flyby. It's pretty cool. Including eclipses. Yes. And this particular amateur is very chagrined that the mission didn't actually take the photos that would have been possible of Pluto occulting Charon

as Charon passed behind Pluto during the encounter. It would have been an incredible photo, but it would have been at the cost of some really great science. So they didn't do it. And the best that we can do now is to take advantage of artists like these guys who can simulate it for us. Really spectacular work with lots of gratitude to these three artists and all the others out there, your colleagues who are manipulating these early images much more to come from Pluto, right? Absolutely. And this kind of work is only possible because of the generosity of the New Horizons team and sharing their data with the public. Hear, hear. Thanks very much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, the return of the CEO, Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Bill, our old friend Jeremy Hansen was in the news. I mean, you'll remember, of course, that he was our special guest when we did Planetary Radio Live. In the October 7, 2014 Planetary Radio, that's where people can hear it. A little plug, yes. We were in Toronto for the International Astronautical Congress, and Jeremy Hansen's a Canadian astronaut who has not flown yet. He's in the queue.

And some disclosure, Matt, I carry a Canadian $5 bill in my wallet because on the back they depict the Canadarm and the International Space Station. Their government, the Canadian government, takes pride in their space station to the point where they put it on their money. That's cool. That's good. Jeremy Hansen's part of that. So Jeremy Hansen, your point is he commented about Mars One, right?

Yeah, and he said, referring to Mars, it's a crappy planet, at least as a place to live. Well, for us humans, I mean, Martians probably, if there are any Martian microbes, they think it's fine. And then we use the word think. They do their thing if they're up there. But yeah, and this is a very good point. This romantic thing, you know, I do lectures at colleges. I was at Illinois Institute of Technology the other day, and you meet a lot of people, a lot of young people, who think it would be great to go live on Mars. And I tell you, it wouldn't be. You'd be living in a box the rest of your life.

You'd never smell the roses unless they're in the box with you. It's not a place to go. You can't breathe, let alone keep warm or find anything suitable for drinking or eating. So it's really this extraordinarily hostile place for us humans. However, Matt, you can't blame people for wanting to go because what we want to do is explore. That's deep within us.

And as I so often claim, if we were to find life there, evidence of life there, fossil bacteria or what have you, it would change the course of human history. It would change the way everybody thinks about what it means to be a living thing in the cosmos. A great place to study, but in the words of the great Elton John, Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. Good. Thanks.

Good tip. Carry on. Great talking with you, Bill. Thanks so much. Thank you. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. When we come back, we are going to talk to the president of the Planetary Society, but about his day job.

And that is the beginnings of the next super camera, Mastcam-Z, that is headed to where else? The Red Planet. The Mars 2020 rover will look a lot like its cousin, Curiosity, but will be a much more sophisticated robot explorer. At its highest point will be a pair of amazing cameras that will show us the red planet as we have never seen it before. Heading the Mastcam-Z project are Principal Investigator Jim Bell of Arizona State University and Deputy PI Justin Mackey of the Jet Propulsion Lab. Jim and Justin participated in the landing site workshop we covered on last week's Planetary Radio.

It was a nice opportunity to begin our coverage of Mastcam-Z. Full disclosure, Jim Bell is also president of the Planetary Society. Lunchtime here at the second workshop for deciding where this rover is going to go. And thank you guys for delaying your meal for a few minutes to talk to us about this camera. laying your meal for a few minutes to talk to us about this camera. Jim, this is going to be an even better camera, right, than we currently have on Mars Science Laboratory. Well, that's the idea, if we build it right.

That's the idea. Unlike Curiosity's color cameras, which are one wide-angle and one high-resolution camera, the Mastcam-Z cameras on Mars 2020 will be a matched zoom camera system, so we'll be able to do stereo at wide angle, stereo at narrow angle, high resolution, and just do a lot more 3D renderings of the landscape to help with the science analysis of rocks and sand dunes and things like that, and also to help with driving the rover, much more so than we're able to do with Curiosity, and to help with putting the instruments down on the different features that we're going to drill and core into. So not so wild guess here. That's the Z, right?

That's the Z, yes, exactly. Mastcam Z. Z for zoom. Wasn't there talk of having the same kind of capability matched zoomable 3D cameras for MSL? There was more than talk. That was what was proposed. That's what was selected. And that team back in 2009 maybe, 2008, 2009, they tried to build a very complex, very highly capable zoom camera system. Weren't able to do it. It was asking a lot to cram a 15-to-1 zoom lens into a very small volume,

not much bigger than a paper towel tube. They ultimately came up short and ended up having to fly these two fixed focal length cameras. But the goal of doing high-res zoom and stereo is still there. We were able to pick that up. The same team at Mail and Space Sciences that built the Curiosity cameras with many of the folks on our science team who were involved with Curiosity, those goals are still there. We have a much simpler zoom system that we're trying to implement.

It's about 3.5 to 1 instead of 15 to 1. We think it has a much better shot of actually being able to get built, and we're going to fly it and have fun with it. Justin, it sounds, therefore, that you have the advantage of building on what you've learned from the MSL experience. That's exactly right. In fact, the team learned a lot during the MSL experience about what sort of mechanical tolerances you need in order to build a system to meet the requirements. And they actually did build a zoom lens back on MSL.

As Jim mentioned, it didn't quite perform as well as the fixed focal length cameras, which is actually true for a lot of zoom lenses. You know, you go buy a professional zoom lens if you're a professional photographer or something. And so the group is taking what they learned and incorporating that into the design itself right now so that when we're designing the lens, they're thinking about manufacturing and assembly as part of that design. And that's the real advantage we have this time around. Tell us more about why this capability, match lenses, 3D capability, zoom, why is that going to be so helpful on Mars?

Why is that going to be so helpful on Mars? Well, it's really critical that we are able to look around at our environment wherever we decide to land, not just in color, which is really important, not just monoscopically, but in stereo, in 3D. From a science perspective, we want to put the context together of this landing site wherever it is. And there's going to be layered rocks and outcrops and hills and valleys. And the three-dimensional structure of that landscape is the key to understanding its geologic history. And so we need that stereo capability. We can get that with the nav cams, which are the lower-resolution cameras

that help with driving and arm placement and all that. And that's great. But we can really beef that up with much higher resolution with these zoom cameras up on the mass there, these color zoom cameras. So there is that sort of science angle. And then, you know, with the nav cams, which Justin has a huge role in here, that helps the rover drivers get to a certain distance, you know, tens of meters, 50 meters, something like that, for driving the next day.

If we can bring the Mastcam-Z capabilities for higher resolution stereo into that situation, into those tools, we can double or triple the distance that they'll be able to drive every day with that higher resolution. And that means we'd be more efficient, we can go farther in less amount of time, might even be able to go places that we wouldn't be able to go to in the lower resolution nav cam data. So that's all both operationally and scientifically. There's lots of great reasons to want to do this 3D imaging. We heard about that not very long ago this morning here at the landing site meeting, that this is going to be a smarter, faster rover.

And I hadn't really considered the role that the cameras play. And I didn't know, Justin, that you were involved with the nav cams as well? Yes, I've been involved in the engineering cameras on all the rovers that we built here at JPL, and I have another role on the project as the imaging scientist where I'm covering sort of all the imaging-related issues related to the navcams and hazcams and how you integrate those image data into the system and how we use them to drive the rover. And to pick up on what Jim said, because every time we do a rover mission, we learn a little

more about how to operate rovers and how the images are used. And one of the things that these better imaging systems bring is an increase in operations efficiency. And we talked about that this morning at the meeting. We heard Jennifer Trosper talk about how there's a big push to try to get more efficient in the way we do things. And the cameras play a huge role in that. And just being able to see farther away, as Jim mentioned, is something that brings a lot to the efficiency game, where if you can see twice as far as you can see with better cameras, you can drive twice as far.

And so that's one of the reasons where we're really looking at the higher resolution zoom capabilities so that we can go beyond what even these improved engineering cameras can see and learn about the 100, 200 meters away and drive out that far, which is what we just can't do right now. More from Jim Bell and Justin Mackey about Mastcam-Z is just ahead. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merk Boyan.

Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos, which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merk. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television?

No. So wait a minute, planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it, they're all going to be online, you can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch planetary TV then, Merc? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org.tv. Casey Dreyer here, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. The New Horizons Pluto encounter was NASA at its best. But did you know that it was almost canceled twice?

It was saved by thousands of space advocates who wrote and called Congress nearly a decade ago. Today, more missions are threatened by budget cuts, including a journey to Europa and the Opportunity rover on Mars. I need you to join me and stand up for space. Sign our petition to Congress today at planetary.org slash stand up. Pluto was just the beginning. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, joined this week by Jim Bell and Justin Mackey. They lead the team that will design and build Mastcam-Z, the stereoscopic zoom cameras that will peer about the Martian surface from atop the

rover set for launch in 2020. Their instrument is just one example of how sophisticated this next rover will be. So Jim, you've got, you guys have, quite literally the highest profile instrument on this 2020 rover, but the whole suite of instruments is going to be pretty impressive. rover. But the whole suite of instruments is going to be pretty impressive. Yeah, it's seven instruments selected to do imaging and spectroscopy to look at the composition and the mineralogy, very close-up imaging to measure the details of the elements in the surface at a microscopic scale. We're going to be trying to collect samples to bring back to the Earth. And we need to prove to ourselves,

we need to prove to our fellow scientists in the planetary science community, we need to prove to Congress that those samples are worthy of returning, that it's a worthy endeavor for the American taxpayers to foot the bill sometime a decade from now or more to bring these samples back. So I think we all feel a lot of pressure in a good way to characterize those samples, those cores, as best as we can to build these catalogs of what's there, what's waiting for us.

We have to go pick it up because sitting in there in those little core tubes could be something that our friend Bill Nye would say would change the world, right? So part of our job and part of the job of all the other instruments is to find the sweet stuff out there. We've got all these rocks and outcrops and hills and dunes. What's the sweetest stuff out there that we can got all these rocks and outcrops and hills and dunes. And what's the sweetest stuff out there that we can capture, put into storage, and then make the case? Let's bring it back. So we're at a site selection meeting. Let's talk about that for a moment or two.

A little while ago, I was talking to your colleague, Ken Edgett from Malin Space Science Systems. And I got a laugh out of him because I accused him of, gee, I just thought you guys would just want to go wherever the prettiest pictures are. I could say the same thing to you guys. Well, you know, it's funny because during the MSL site selection process for Curiosity, that factor was kind of a tiebreaker in my mind. I really liked three or four sites at the end end and I was trying to think we'd be happy scientifically really going to any of these sites. And we looked to the engineers to tell us, well, you can't go to this you have to go to this one. And they were like, nope, you can go anywhere you want. You can pick any of these

four sites. And we're like, darn it, you guys are supposed to help us make this decision. And so I, in my mind, was sort of thinking about imagine the view of Mount Sharp from the surface. Imagine starting to climb up this mountain, go into this valley and see this canyon ahead of us and all the great science we can do and the things that have been done, but add to that the incredible landscape vistas that we would get. And so I do think that those kinds of things are tiebreakers. I think that the public thinks about that. I think NASA thinks about public interest and, you know,

the photogenic nature of the sites that we're going to. And so maybe the same thing will happen. Maybe it will end up being sort of a tiebreaker when we get down to the end a couple of years from now and having to make that tough choice as we're going here. Yeah, unfortunately, a couple of years from now and having to make that tough choice as we're going here. Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of the very interesting sites are also fantastic vistas, too. There's a correlation that if there's some interesting geology going on, then chances are that the pictures will be interesting, too. It's like you go to the Grand Canyon, you take pictures of the Grand Canyon because it just looks great, but there's a lot of interesting geology going on there as well. That's true.

And with, like, Opportunity, for example, the Opportunity rover, you know, some of the most spectacular vistas we've seen are in those craters where you've got the steep walls and the layered deposits. And some of the most boring vistas are the places in between them, right, where you've got sand dunes to the horizon, you know. And even our colleagues who love sand dunes get kind of bored of these pictures. Once you've seen the first one, they tend to repeat. So there's a huge range of diversity of landscapes, and I think that will be a factor in here at some point.

I don't necessarily need you to commit yourself right now, but got any favorites from the pack of candidates that are being talked about? and talked about? Personally, I kind of like the delta sites, thinking about low energy lakes and places where sediments that could contain organic molecules or organic fragments from anything that might have been alive there or heading towards living there, where those things could be preserved in a very gentle way. And, you know, I just returned from some vacation in upstate New York where it's mudstones and shales everywhere, very gentle ocean floor and lake floor sediments. And you go and you crack open a piece of shale and you find fossils in it. You know, it's just so easy to preserve organic remains in those environments.

And so deltas are like that. And we're looking at three or four or five possible delta sites here. But there's lots of other great places too. So I don't know how it's all going to work out. Justin? You know, the same thing. I like the delta sites, but we have a lot to unfold here the next day or two. And so I'm going to stay neutral as long as I can. But I see a lot of compelling things coming forward here. I looked at the agenda agenda and it looks like it's going to be pretty interesting. Guys, as you know, Planetary Radio and the Planetary Society are going to be carefully tracking your development of this terrific new camera. Not just the development

but actually seeing the beautiful images that we're hoping it's going to start returning back to Earth in 2020. What kinds of milestones lie ahead? Just very briefly. Well, first of all, I think it's great to get Planetary Society involved so early in this process and maybe help people understand, you know, how are instruments born? Where do they come from? You know, right now our cameras don't exist.

They're PowerPoint cameras, right? We have to go through all these. They're in our heads and our imaginations're PowerPoint cameras, right? We have to go through all these imaginations and computer models, right? We have to go through all these reviews and documentation. And it's just a real bear to get through until you get permission, like in late 2016, okay, go ahead, start building things, you know, and you pass that review. And I don't think there's been a lot of coverage in the past at this level of, you level of helping the general public understand how these things come about

and so starting from the beginning is great and then of course we'll all go through testing together once the cameras are built involve people in that and see what's involved making sure you get the colors right eventually and all that kind of stuff and then we'll all go through the terror of launch together, you know, and we'll be sick to our stomachs and hopefully dancing at the same time, right?

The terror of EDL, you know, and I think that showing how this is really a human endeavor, how it's a team of people who you have to give up a lot of your personal life and your time, and, you know, the spacecraft doesn't care about your kid's birthday party and stuff like that. That story, I think, is going to be a fun one to see unfold and to tell. And this is just Chapter 1. Gentlemen, thanks very much. I look forward to talking to you many times over the next five, six, seven, who knows how many years. Lots and lots of years, Matt.

Let's do it. Thanks. Jim Bell of Arizona State University and Justin Mackey of JPL, Principal Investigator and Deputy PI for Mastcam-Z on the 2020 Mars rover. Time once again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We have the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society.

That's Dr. Bruce Betts. Welcome. We are in the studio at Planetary Society HQ. Yeah, it's pretty spiffy in here. It's getting better all the time. Our colleague, Merck, is starting to deck it out with all kinds of video stuff, like these cool blue LED-lit bookcases behind us. They're perfect for radio. They really are nice.

In fact, I was thinking we should turn them up so people can not see us as well or better. Okay, shall we start? In the night sky, you've got Saturn over there in the south in the early evening. Kind of yellowish and lovely near Antares. And I remind you, if you've got a small telescope, get it out because checking out the rings of Saturn, you can see them even in a small telescope. It's pretty cool. In the pre-dawn, low in the east for the next several weeks, you're going to have Mars and Venus.

Venus being much, much, much, much brighter, but right now lower down. Mars looking reddish as usual. We move on to this week in space history. In 1977, Voyager 1 launched, oddly after Voyager 2. And in 1979, Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to ever fly by Saturn. On to Random Space Fact. Stage whisper. It was just so quiet in here, I thought it would be nice.

This is kind of an obvious space fact, except I would guess a lot of people haven't thought about it, which is that synchronous locked moons, like the Earth's moon, or many of Jupiter's moons, that always face one side towards the planet, that also means they always have the same leading and the same trailing sides, which doesn't make a huge difference here at Earth. But say in the Jupiter system, it means you pick up stuff knocked off other moons on your leading side.

But on your trailing side, because the magnetosphere actually rotates faster than the moons, it pelts the trailing side with high-energy charged particles that alter the surface. Isn't this what gave us that, which of the moons is it? Is it Iapetus that looks like a black-and-white cookie? It's more like a black-and-white walnut. It is related. Iapetus turns out to be more complicated as with most things than we expect but yes it's that concept you can end up with hemispheric variations that's cool so you

can actually if you were to stand on the moon at the what the apex of the leading edge you'd have this whole body following you basically exactly which Exactly. Which, you know, you can do on Earth, but only for a split second each day. All right. We move on to the trivia contest. We asked you how many hexagonal segments will make up the primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope, forming the entire diameter of 6.5 meters. This was a good week to get in on the contest. I don't know, vacations, back to school.

You had a better shot this time at being the lucky one, drawn out of the hat of the astronaut helmet by Random.org. It was top of the list, Ryan Hyken of Glen Burnie, Maryland. He said the James Webb Space Telescope will consist of 18 thin, lightweight beryllium mirror segments. Correct? That is indeed correct. He added to that, JWST is not only larger. Now, this caught me by surprise, and we heard this from several people.

But the mass will be about 625 kilograms, much lighter than that of the Hubble. And this is like five times the light gathering. I think that's pretty amazing. This is a big spacecraft. It's a very big spacecraft. And it kind of unfolds because you have to cram it into a rocket. And then they've used clever materials and webbing, James webbing, to keep the mass down. Well, congratulations, Ryan.

Looks like you are the winner for this week. And for that, you're going to get another fabulous, well, I don't know, it's probably your first one, a fabulous Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net account. And that's for their worldwide network of telescopes. As we say all the time, you can take pictures with it. We've got people who are looking forward to winning this because they're northern hemisphere types, and they've been dying to do astrophotography in the southern hemisphere,

and this is the poor man's way to do it, or the economical man or woman's way to do it. And we're going to do those same prizes again for this new question that Bruce has for you this week. What moon in our solar system is closest to the size of the Earth's moon besides the Earth's moon? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until Tuesday, September 8th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer this time around and maybe win yourself that shirt and eye telescope account.

I believe we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about the strangest chair you've ever sat in. I'm going to try one right now. Go over there. Give it a shot. This is a great chair. This looks like, you know, the kind of thing you'd throw baseballs at.

I think I missed that, that wonderful reaction. That's a good facsimile. It's very cool. You could probably use it as a trampoline, except that it would fire you at the opposite wall. Good night, Bruce. Good night. Can you give me a help up? I'll be happy to. Put the computer down. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society,

who joins us every week and sometimes from the oddly equipped new television studio at the Planetary Society. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its sharp-eyed members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan, tweeting now and then from at PlanRad. Clear skies.