Neil deGrasse Tyson and NASA Chief Scientist Explain New Mars Rover

[Music] chuck we got another explainer video ready to drop ah yes and a good one indeed well i don't know if it's good yet well you know what i do i do indeed you're thinking this one's going to be good i i'm telling you right now because we we got we got some really um some significant help to make this one really good and i love getting some help we've got james green from nasa with us to do an explainer video on mars mars because we are going back to mars jim great to have you back remind me of your like full title at nasa uh i am the nasa chief scientist excuse me exactly i i was the head of planetary that's what i thought that's what i remembered yeah no i i uh got promoted uh-huh so that's nice so jim you got that new fancy title okay but also you got into the podcast business okay what's the name of your podcast it's called gravity assist this is our game yeah yeah it's the fourth season and uh today uh we've been taping uh all about the search for life beyond earth it's a great season excellent excellent so we just launched the mars perseverance rover why didn't we launch last year or oh well you know indeed every 26 months the orbits of earth and mars line up to be on the same side of the sun that we actually can get to mars as quickly as possible so it's a window it's a window yeah yeah and so it's much like american football where you throw the football down the field and the receiver runs and grabs it and that's all that's what we're going to do it's a ballistic trajectory from earth to mars so so you're launching this to arrive where mars will be when it gets there on the 18th of february mark my word wow my boy's got some confidence in newtonian physics right i was going to say he better uh seeing how uh i saw the budget so helped us out you know so so jim what's uh what's different about this rover compared to the others uh this one is absolutely fantastic it's a huge step forward because not only does it sort of look like curiosity it's got all new instruments and one of them on the arm is a rock corer so we are going to mars and creating cores like this so it's not just it's not just the surface material right you're going in we're going in we're going to core rock and rock the rock record is so important as we know here on earth it's the history of the geology of the earth same thing on mars so we're going to look for aspects of climate change and whether early mars may have had life so where are you targeting on mars for this we're going to a crater called jezreel crater but it's really it's really right at the ancient shoreline of mars and so there's a river an ancient river bringing material from large regions on mars into this crater and depositing a delta and then flowing over the crater wall into the ancient ocean jim there's no water on mars now so not at the moment but in the past in the past in the past now it turns out mars does have an enormous amount of water it's just locked underneath the surface and in the in the northern polar cap but what you're describing as this target is a place where formerly water was just there right four billion years ago and you're you're going for beachfront property yeah and you know why it's really you know we think about life coming out of our ocean onto land learning how to evolve and live on the land and so the the you know that ancient shoreline is where a lot of our missions go gotcha so now where is the atmospheric generator buried deep inside of mars where would that be [Laughter] chuck wants to move there chuck wants to buy property on that beachfront wants a condo hey listen you know what they say buy on the fringe and wait okay you may have to ask arnold about where he'd find it there arnold exactly send you back to mars [Music] [Laughter] so uh if this is styled like uh curiosity was does that mean it will arrive at mars the same way curiosity did and what was that there was six minutes of terror will it survive the the entry are we gonna watch we're gonna experience that again with this we are we're gonna use the same process if it worked once and you know it's not always a guarantee it's gonna work exactly the same way we're going to do that again and the reason why is this rover is even more massive than curiosity is this one is a little more than one metric ton wow so you're talking about can i ask you both a question it's the size of a car you're dropping a car that's huge so can i ask you guys a question when you talk about you know dropping this rover down into mars okay so when something enters earth's atmosphere it's basically the atmosphere that is the problem because it's a lot of friction creates all this heat but mars doesn't have a lot of atmosphere right so what are the big worries and what's the big like uh drawback to putting something on the surface of mars wait chuck i have to correct you just briefly you're thinking of the atmosphere as a problem because it's heat it's not however go ahead the atmosphere allows you to slow down oh so atmosphere is breaks out yes yes okay jim take it from there all right so when we hit the top of the atmosphere we're going 13 000 miles per hour and when we land six and a half minutes later we've got to be going inches per second wow and so we have a lot of momentum to take out and it starts with the heat shield okay and one way to do that is uh mars's atmosphere is actually much thinner than ours and so we need to travel in the atmosphere as much as we can so we change the center of gravity of the capsule instead of having it come down straight we blow some mass it this way and fly as parallel to the surface of mars as we can so with without even without even having atmosphere you're almost creating like a glider well the friction indeed just slows it down from that 13 000 miles per hour to then about 250 or so miles per hour then we change the mass distribution write it papa shoot and that shoot then allows us to get it down below 100 miles an hour or so before we drop the rover to the surface okay now i'm just going to say something i've never been in a uh i've never been in a collision at 100 miles an hour before uh because i probably wouldn't be here so correct so i mean you you say that like a hundred miles an hour as a fender bender how do you what happens what happens at 100 miles an hour when you hit the ground well we have a platform that sits on top of the rover and it has retro rockets they then take off and slow the vehicle down from 100 miles an hour from 100 miles an hour yeah from 100 miles an hour slows it down and actually stops it at about 25 meters from the surface which chuck just to be clear they could have done that upon contact with the atmosphere but it would have needed fuel to slow them down from 13 000 miles an hour so why not use the atmosphere to take most of that out and save the little bit of fuel you're carrying for just that last little leg did i get that right yeah that's right and so what will happen then this uh this uh platform that sits on top of the rover is called the sky crane and the reason why is we're going to crane it down to the surface so as we start the craning then the then the fact that we've sort of folded up the rover inside and tucked it into the capsule allows it for the wheels to come out and lock and everything get ready for then the rover to sit down on the surface at inches per second so you've got a joist that's unrolling for this thing to descend yeah that's crazy no it's not it makes fantastic sense when you think about it but there's a lot of thing it's like a rube goldberg thing first you do you do the hokey pokey you move the center of mass you put out the drug shoot you have the retro rockets you pop the tires and i'm thinking aren't those many points oh yeah that's right and we have to test each and every one of them and then we try to figure out how to test them in between but because curiosity landed using that same approach we have great confidence that we can re repeat that okay so we'll use the same procedures what are these images i've seen of something that looks like it it's got like uh drone propellers or something what is that ah so in addition to the rover you know that that looks like curiosity you know this huge rover this little model of it underneath the belly pan sits what we call a technology demonstration mission and it turns out to be a helicopter and it's a counter rotating uh set of uh uh of wings you know that then uh rotate blades that rotate more than 3000 rpm and then uh takes off now how we do that is we first drop it then we get out of the way and then we send the command take off that's super cool and then is is it going anywhere or is it to go take pictures is it yeah because it's a test you know we've never flown anything in in an atmosphere besides the earth so this is the first flight of an object and you need those high rpms because of the thin atmosphere right that's right and it's only four pounds so it's only lifting a little box about four pounds and so it's going to go through several tests so the first test is pick up go a couple meters up and then come down that and that'll be successful then we'll charge up the batteries and the next day we'll do another test that test will be go up translate and then sit down translate it's code for move sideways move sideways yes okay sorry right i thought it was just going to like start to learn martian you know translated tomorrow translate hello we come in peace so so jim this mission is um you you speak of it as though you're just having a conversation with the rover but there's the time delay of your signal it's like what 20 minutes 10 20 minutes or so well for mars is orbit based on where earth is it can be anywhere from four minutes to 22 minutes okay so you can't just say watch out for the cliff right and it's too late that's right and so what's happening now is uh we will be about uh six or seven minutes away uh light travel time to uh to mars and so everything's got to be done automatically the whole entire landing sequence is done automatically all right so so james your your professional background is it from geology or from astronomy i'm a magnetospheric physicist okay well neither okay yeah so so i never met a magnetic field i didn't like wow okay so um so tell me what experiments are on this mission and then we got to sort of wrap it up after that so ranking in your favorite order of what this thing is going to do all right so the core that's important there's two instruments that help the core make the decision once by the way i'm not a geologist i keep thinking what the rock is on the surface is probably the same a few inches in but you're telling me no the rock could be completely different on the inside curiosity told us that so when you know the the red mars is there and when we took uh and dug just below the surface we saw gray mars oh because it's not oxidized it's a planet it's not oxidized oh it's a different planet mars is red from the iron oxides okay got it right so indeed finding the right spot to core is important and so the context instruments are sherlock and pixel those are on the arm and they're going to do imaging and they're going to help us decide here's where we're going to go in addition to that we have another instrument called rimfax it's from norway and it sits underneath the belly pan next to where the copter would be after we drop it and it is a ground penetrating radar it gives a stratigraphy it gives us an idea hey this might be a good place to drill that's important and then we have you know right on the mast uh right here at the top a fabulous instrument uh uh called super camp and it is designed to send out a laser evaporate the rock get a spectrum and help us understand the composition of the rocks in front of us and then guide us to where we want to go you know chuck chuck if if if martians are there on the surface and they see this with laser beams coming out of it they're going to think we're declaring war exactly we no longer come in peace we no longer come in peace we come here to vaporize you exactly you know you know they may think we're just heating up the place so they can you know barbecue out but that might be a different story another instrument is mass cam all right and this one you know has um has a fabulous set of cameras that sit below super cam and and they are at about the height of my eyes which uh since i'm six four at about six feet so the stereo imaging we get is going to be just like a human walking around on the surface so then we have an instrument called moxie this is the one that brings in the atmosphere we zap it and so you take co2 which is a predominant atmospheric composition pop off an oxygen giving you then carbon monoxide and oxygen you vent the carbon monoxide and then you understand how much oxygen you can get from the process and we do that during the morning afternoon and evening and throughout the year that gives us an efficiency factor and that's you know that's like mark watney's oxygenator this is so this is like if you if you go there this you'll have prior knowledge of how effectively you can pull oxygen out of the co2 molecule that's right and and that's important to supplement whatever we take there and in fact it may be the main way we acquire oxygen to use in a variety of purposes breathing of course is one of them adding hydrogen to it gives us water so there's you know oxygen is important got to have it there's another instrument that is pretty special to me all right and and hardly anyone knows about it but you know as had a planetary and we were putting this together i said we absolutely have to have a phone call sorry i'm sorry i took a guess say it again jim i i stepped up boulders i went with cup holders but i'm sorry say it again but what is it okay so the new instrument that's on it that i i really like is a microphone this allows us to hear the sounds of mars sweet yeah now i i don't expect it at night while tree well uh perseverance is sitting there grunging away with stuff that we hear the crickets but we're going to hear all kinds of sounds as the rover moves it you know we can use it from an engineering perspective because if you hear metal against metal we're going to stop it right away and figure out what's happening and so um not only is it going to be fantastic to listen to the winds and the sound of mars will actually hear the sounds of the rover moving during the day and even at night but the first thing in the world would be is if you heard this are they gone yet yeah you're right right right or or or quick duck the camera's turning this way get out of the way [Laughter] i would dearly like that let's see if we can find that in the data the weird thing is not that you would hear them speaking but that they'd be speaking english that would be the total weird thing exactly james we got to call it quits there listen uh good luck to you and the mission and all you we and it's not the parent here in this interview but thousands of people work on these on these crafts they do all right excellent james i will get back to you when when it arrives at mars safely uh we'll get you back on and just get an update on how this is turning out my pleasure let's do it chuck always good to see you man always a pleasure to be here all right this has been a special edition star talk explainer getting the latest on our missions to mars as always keep looking up especially if you're looking at mars you

Channel: StarTalk

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Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Chuck Nice, James Green, Perseverance, rover, Mars, Curiosity, NASA, ancient Martian shoreline, six minutes of terror, rock corer, high-tech cameras, ground-penetrating radar, Ingenuity, tiny helicopter, mars rover, new mars rover, jim green, perseverance rover

Id: qKgApB5psUo

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020