StarTalk Podcast: Mars Perseverance with Jim Green, NASA Chief Scientist

[Music] this is star talk i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist and we're here with a cosmic queries edition we love me some cosmic queries ain't that right chuck yes sir absolutely that's because you you collect all the cosmic queries and i don't know if you bring them to stump our guests or what you know do you filter them or they just randomly plucked from the uh they are actually taken by a randomizer so i can't i cannot take credit for pulling them which means that uh please don't send me your questions personally all right so chuck today's cosmic queries we're going to explore the perseverance rover of nasa in which uh this month we're recording this in february uh lands in february and it was launched you know nine months ago ten months ago and so but i don't have particular expert i know about a little bit something about mars but not specifically about perseverance and i think you don't know about either right so absolutely i i know about curiosity and i don't know oh and i'm not talking about a lander all right uh so we've got our friend at nasa at nasa headquarters jim green jim welcome back to stark talk thank you so much neil and chuck always a pleasure always a pleasure to see you and i was looking at i was looking at your full bio and i'd forgotten i mean i remember but i forgot that you used to be head of planetary science for nasa but now you're ahead of like all astrophysics wow well that's badass yeah i'm just the chief scientist so oh shoot sheep sure not just not just astrophysic science scientists right that's defying all categories yes that's true so that's that's badass i'm just saying that's yeah i've enjoyed that i mean it's really all about uh advising the administrator on uh new science activities and and wonderful things that are going on in the agency and the fact that you came to it as a planetary guy means you have good sort of geology sense as well so and if you did planets it meant you had some good astronomy in there so you've got enough of a diverse background to serve the scientific portfolio of nasa is that a fair statement that is that is uh you know i've got a undergraduate degree in astronomy uh you know in fact i just finished my first exoplanet paper you know i've uh you know i've been involved in a lot of planetary uh uh magnetospheres and and done some solar physics so i've touched on heliophysics and uh of course one of my favorite planets is the earth that's a good choice one of my favorites my one of my favorite too chuck your favorite uh mine is kepler 22 at this particular point he's showing off no i'm not that's from that's from a sci-fi movie i would i wouldn't know oh oh oh oh the series the sci-fi series the firefight series yes that that uh they're called raised by wolves so that's that's the only reason i said that is that the ridley scott series that is correct sir yes and it is oh man i gotta catch up with you on that one but it's a habitable exoplanet it's uh is is one of the main characters in the movie in the uh in the series and kepler was a nasa telescope memory serves fabulous absolutely really pushed uh the boundaries of what we know about um the developing uh planets around other stars i just love it when nasa discoveries fuse into pop culture and then it just becomes part of how people think about the world around us so this is a cosmic queries but before we get to questions that people have sent our way on perseverance just remind us why is this yet another rover to mars i mean how many damn rovers are we going to send what did you not learn last time that you're going to pick up this time well of course with curiosity we learned that mars was really quite diverse than what it is today in its past we explored the past of mars we found out that mars four billion years ago had an enormous amount of water and the conditions were such that it could have been habitable we really didn't know that and now we're going to push the next step on that and that is to go to an area and look for ancient life and that's what perseverance is going to do wow oh okay so each rover mission stands on the shoulders of the previous mission in the questions that it gets to ask absolutely that's the way it works nice and and you have to send a whole new vehicle to do that well it turns out of course uh spirit and opportunity looked so much different than what curiosity does but at the end of uh uh curiosity's uh building we had many spare parts and so i think we had like 200 million dollars worth of spare parts left over from curiosity like an ikea of furniture yeah well no that's if you don't know how to build it you have spare parts wait wait jim no but i'm telling you you're making a soul a single object a single thing called curiosity and you're telling me they're leftover parts this isn't some heath kit that you bought from radio shack this is this so what do you mean you have leftover parts well we have duplicate parts so when guys does it fit here nice [ __ ] any suggestions guys on this what for everybody i'm sorry go on no problem for every one of our missions we want to be able indeed to have spare parts around or extra parts such that if there's a failure we can immediately bring in the new part and not worry about ordering your supplies so it's a real critical real critical of thinking it's a necessary redundancy it's a necessary uh for building the mission right wow okay you got me there okay i'll let you slide on that one but that's the last time i'm letting you and tell me you want you going up there with a helicopter so what's up with that so one of the elements one of the important elements of this mission is actually enabling the future and to do that we're going to push the envelope on our understanding of getting around on mars and a helicopter is really a unique idea to do that you know so this is what we call a technology demonstration you know we're going to be able to hopefully uh drop this helicopter off the belly pan of the of the rover drive away let it unfurl and then order it to start flying and we'll do a variety of tests and it will go up and then come down and then we'll go up and translate and then come down you know and after translate means it it will just go horizontally when you say translate its position okay so chuck you know what this would look like if a cartoonist drew this the martians would be watching this and the rover drops the helicopter out of its belly and it thinks it was pregnant right gave birth we're babysitting all of a sudden what kind of helicopter if i'm not mistaken mars has a different atmosphere than earth so wouldn't we have to have a different helicopter indeed indeed so it's drone-like in many ways you know it has a small body but it but it has very long uh of uh you know rotors and they're about a meter you know about a yardstick long okay and there's two of them and they counter rotate and that enables this small uh helicopter which is uh you know a box like a cubesat you know it's a it's about uh 10 or 12 centimeters by uh 10 or 12 centimeters in a cube that enables this then to be lofted and fly uh great distances you know 50 60 70 meters before it sets down again so but the real problem is the martian atmosphere is really thin so you have to compensate by having bigger rotors is that that's your solution that's right and the counter rotation helps the stability so that we don't need a rotor on the tail so it's a design feature now if you can imagine this working then the next set of missions could indeed leverage this concept and lay down additional helicopters to then survey massive regions up close on the surface of mars so it's a what we'd call a an enabling technology demonstration for future missions beautiful cool beautiful oh and one last thing is this is landing on mars the same way uh curiosity did it does it does so it's this it looks very rube goldbergian you know with a drug shoot and retro rocket and this and and who came up with that well the jpl engineers are some really fantastic jet propulsion labs propulsion lab engineers fantastic people that had a long experience in landing craft on mars and the whole concept evolved you know we we started with uh pathfinder and uh uh pathfinder is a platform for which the sojourner rover rode on we landed that and and then the sojourner rover came off the platform and then we had spirit and well wait you didn't land that one you bounced that one if i remember we bounced it we bounced it you bounced it with some airbags we did we did and we used that same concept you know spirit and opportunity and and you know they bounced of course and then when we deflated the bags the rover sits upright on a platform and then drives i just loved how i loved how low-tech it was for something to do something high-tech afterwards yeah there's something really genius about using a hoppity hop to drown to to land a sophisticated piece of space machinery that's incredible well it you know for spirit and opportunity we believe it bounced perhaps as much as 30 times before it actually settled down on the surface where we could deflate the bags and then move it off the platform so imagine this now now we're going to build a bigger rover okay spirit and opportunity are less than 200 kilograms okay and now we're gonna do one metric ton okay 2 000 kilogram a thousand kilograms a thousand kilograms five times what spirit and opportunity were okay so the concept is well we start out with a platform can we put it on a platform and then figure out how to land the platform the problem was the center of gravity was too high so if it's on the platform it's going to flip over so now we can't land it on you don't want that don't want that i can tell that right now okay so then the next evolution in thinking is okay let's put the platform on top of the rover all right and that gives it retro rockets all the way down to the surface and you land it then the problem is how do you get the platform off the rover so then the unique idea is let's hover it and lower the rover down to the surface while the platform is hovering at about 20 meters and when you see it like with a joist or something right some kind of joystick that's called the sky crane and when you decrease sky yeah the sky cream and when you think about that that's a process we do here on earth with helicopters every day dropping off cargo picking them up going through that process so why couldn't we engineer that for a mars mission excellent excellent so it's so it's brilliant to know i mean engineers this they live for this right yeah they know what has worked in one application and they modify it add to it no that's i love it i love it so so chuck what kind of questions you have hey let's jump into it um we'll start with leslie murray by the way let me just say uh jim people love nasa like you guys you guys need to take a little bit more advantage of the public goodwill that you uh enjoy and get more money because people love not only domestically but internationally internationally as well yeah i mean there's people are so excited here it's great yeah anyway this is leslie murray and she says jim green is this from patreon is this a patreon um leslie does not say oh actually patreon yes sir thank you thank you very much okay uh these are patreon uh these are patreon folk first and uh as we say um we certainly enjoy anyone who supports us on patreon uh because we certainly enjoy uh money so thank you um i'm just i'm just being honest but please forgive truck he's still in training for in this house listen i'm sorry i don't know how to diplomatically say thank you for giving us money it's very hard for me to figure out the proper way to say that yeah we'll put you in it we'll debrief you after the show okay all right so all right what's up murray uh patreon she says this um jim green very excited to ask you if you could have added just one more interesting instrument to the rover what would have what would it have been like i love that question i like and this she says this like every rover i'm sure this one was on a weight loss plan um well i i have to tell you of course i was head of planetary we landed the curiosity that worked great in and we began the concept of well we needed we need bring back samples we need to go and get the rock samples that tell the history of mars and we need to bring them back and and that that was the thrust of what perseverance is going to do and and how we were able to convince nasa and the administration and then congress to support this next move so the instrument i wanted that i dearly would have loved to have on it i actually got it on and that is an audio instrument you know we've never landed on mars and listened you know to to the wind to what we can hear and i now have two microphones uh on on uh nice okay when you send audio instrument i know you meant microphone i'm at a microphone i gotta tell you jim when you said audio instrument i was like what a waste of money you sent a radio to mars who why not put some cup holders on it who is listening who is listening to whatever commercial but no yeah exactly but no the microphone that's super cool okay so it adds another dimension to our senses we think of and feel about mars very good oh my god so when when this thing lands and you deploy these microphones you're we're we're going to be able to like go to nasa uh and and listen to what mars actually sounds like yes but even i guess it does storms and things even before we land we're going to turn on one of the microphones during the landing process oh my god so we will hear what's going on inside the capsule as it hits the top of the atmosphere and and the in huge temperature variation just outside the heat shield is going on as it's burning away the material on the on the heat shield and then the chute and then the sky crane all the way down to the surface so we turn it on right away okay now since i've been zooming for 11 months now i just want to make sure do you have a mute button because that can be problematic [Laughter] well um not that i'm aware of we do have an on and off button but um our hope is that everything will survive intact and we'll be able to use this engineering microphone as it moves and the reason why that's so important what we found out with curiosity is as it went over some rough terrain the rocks were literally breaking the aluminum uh wheels you know poking through them and so the engineering microphone is designed to hear the creaking and the cracking and the moving and then that's an element of the diagnostic of the environment that we're in that helps manage the rover and its assets to keep it going wow this is that that old story you take your car into the shop and they ask you well what's wrong with it and he said well it's making the sound and it goes like like [Laughter] there's the acoustic diagnostics in this case we'll be able to play it wow play it back uh just before we go to break um is the carbon dioxide atmosphere such that frequencies will come across differently in the sound um than what will you have to shift it to like an earth spectrum of audio so we'll actually know what's going on or we're just going to enjoy um the higher or lower frequencies commensurate with the well it'll be lower you know so turn up your bass uh you know the the atmosphere is heavier and you know carbon co2 is uh heavier than oxygen and nitrogen and of course as we talked about it's a much thinner atmosphere so sounds that we would normally hear as high pitch will be very low you know it will be base level and of course once we have that data we can change the range and enhance it but i think it will be absolutely fascinating to hear the real sounds of mars based on the the atmospheric composition and the pressure i was just going to say i think it'd be more fascinating if you turn the microphone on and you heard ladies and gentlemen thank you for tuning in to radio mars well you know the hope is at night at night wait wait wait it'll be and now this is the martian version of barry white and then it's a frequency so low you can't even hear the frequency well you know at night we hope to hear you know crickets right or or something else that would be cool that would you would that would that would be scary that would also change the entire existence of our life here martian crickets and crickets every martian comedian's worst nightmare my marching crickets yeah if they're crickets after you tell a joke you're on the wrong planet all right this is where crickets are really important so we take a quick break we're gonna come back with jim green chief scientist of nasa we're talking about the perseverance rover on star talk we're back star talk cosmic queries mars perseverance edition i got chief scientist james green jim just welcome back to star talk it's always great to know you're there for us and uh and nasa has a huge social media presence i think your biggest handle there is just at nasa right yeah you got a squillion followers on at nasa not only in in twitter but in especially in instagram where you're knocking it out of the park every time you put out something on the universe just congratulations to to all of you for creating those images and the social media team for for navigating them in ways that the public can embrace not only does nasa have their handles social media handles but you have a podcast with the greatest name ever gravity assist very cool what kind of guests do you have on there oh neil i have some of the fabulous working scientists that are uncovering some of the secrets of the universe that you know really won't end up in textbooks for many years and it's so chuck he's compiling the secrets of the universe without telling anybody i am okay that's what that is so i just ended my fourth season and the podcast is called gravity assist can't lose with that okay good good good luck with that good luck with that this really to me shows that the public is very inquisitive i mean it's a it's an element of our nature to to really try to see and uncover new phenomena in new regions and take new views of of the universe we live in not to mention seek out new life and new civilizations and he left out that part yeah thanks for continuing to boldly go yeah where no human has gone before there you go all right thanks chuck for completing the the yeah you have to finish that out otherwise you can't leave it dangling all right what else you got chuck nathan nathan hui says will there be any live footage capturing the perseverance's exciting landing and maneuvers and if so how will it be recorded and how can we watch thank you and good luck nathan well you know it's kind of cool because how do you you know where how like yeah how do you record the thing that you're in unless you have some something else recording it yeah camera out on a boom or something so what are you doing there right so what what of course happens is uh once we land uh we actually uh will begin to unfurl a variety of things so so here is um a model of the rover and one of the first things that will come up will be our major camera and this is as tall as a human is in fact if i stood next to uh perseverance i would i would i would just be looking into the camera lenses that are on the mast this gives us a wonderful opportunity to view the area as a human would but okay but that's after you've landed that's after you've landed but you've got nothing for us yeah you guys got nothing for us while you're plunging through the atmosphere we do we have a whole series of cameras in many different locations and so what we will see is we'll see the the the parachute deploy we'll see that we'll also see the heat shield drop away in the ground below us come up rapidly and then we'll see uh that view of the ground as we land it with the sky print cool will there be any sky crane footage so of the lander itself making its small descent from the sky crane down to the surface well we'll only know that's happening because we will uh hear and see the ground come up as we lower the rover and we will also hear the retro rockets that are firing holding this the the platform the sky crane above the surface hovering okay but you don't have a camera in the sky crane looking down as the rover descends that would be kind of cool yeah it would be okay so next mission next mission chuck said chuck told you here and now that that's on your next mission sweet oh one other thing of course mars is many many light minutes away yeah so if we watch this what we think of as live is really delayed by how much well uh light travels you know an enormous speed but it's still gonna take uh close to eight to ten minutes uh before we actually get the signal uh and then we're going to damn so mars is like a hundred million miles away damn when this is happening it's a waste it's a ways away so the whole thing could have just exploded and busted up on landing and then we'll just sit there and think everything is fine for another eight minutes indeed we won't we won't have we won't have any knowledge of that and so that's you know what you're bringing up is a perfect point everything has to work the first time perfectly and we can't joystick it we can't make any mods and when it hits the top of the atmosphere it is on its own very cool all right again right shout out to the engineers who made that work okay chuck give me some more here we go uh neil chuck jim my name is violetta i am 12 and a half years old and i have a very important twelve and a half make sure you get that half in there absolutely so important right i've i am still using uh halves and quarters a teenager almost a teenager 12 and a half i think yeah does anybody say 22 and a half i i'm not sure um what is your advice for the next generation of nasa scientists in regards to space exploration what should we dream of study and dream of now if we expect to one day be the first generation that travels to mars this is a 12 and a half year old asking this so that's really uh that's really cool well it's really all about following your passion get involved in an element whether it's engineering or some aspect of the science and just immerse yourself enjoy it and let it lead you to these different opportunities whether it's an opportunity to work in a company or industry or laboratory that are involved in building instruments uh or or in one of the nasa centers you know and even getting involved in in building space vehicles for humans nasa collaborates with companies like lockheed martin and boeing and and other places to build spacecraft so nasa doesn't build all their own spacecraft space probes correct right for perseverance and of course the ingenuine ingenuity helicopter we built those nasa did build both of those but it required instruments to be built by many different groups and universities okay so what that means is what we think of as nasa's budget goes not only to nasa but to innovative corporate companies engineering companies that also do work in the service of nasa so they would get a paycheck that's not signed by nasa but signed by their own company but ultimately it came from all of us supporting that enterprise indeed did i capture that yes you did just to summarize what you're saying jim is that it's one thing to say oh they're doing this now let me train so i can do that when i'm their age that's one thing another thing is i am so passionate about this thing whatever it is maybe it's my passion that will create an opportunity that doesn't even exist there today yes indeed that is really the case to dream big and then follow your passion follow your dream and then maybe other people will beat a path to the door of your passion and then you'll be the leader the next leader of the science at nasa that's right and have a badass business card [Laughter] all right chuck keep it coming all right here we go this is toby sonnenberg who says hey neil and jim how can nasa predict which rocks may hold signs of an ancient biochemistry if that biochemistry is completely alien to us uh i think yeah that that there may be some assumptions being made in that question but still yeah no no no excellent assumptions so jim if we're looking for life as we know it are you going to miss life as we don't we don't wow indeed we don't want to just look for life as we know it we need to be open-minded and that requires getting the samples back the ancient history of mars is in that rock record and we're gonna uh you know create a core in fact here's what the cores look like with a drill so here's here's a core so it's a core is like basically a cylinder that you extract from the object and then you have the full record of layering that's right so somewhere in in this time history life may have arisen on mars all right so now we have to bring this back because we can't in in any way interrogate this sample on the surface of mars where were you in the night of july 10th and so you can't use the word interrogate in front of black people of that word sorry not your fault not your fault i'm just saying oh god that's just funny okay oh gosh uh you're interrogating your core sample yes to do that analysis we then want to put the core in a sleeve like this and then we'll lay it on the ground for later pick up by another mission and so we are out we are actually planning now to pick up the sticks to pick up the cores yeah and then brilliant we're building a mars ascent vehicle to bring it back now it's the analysis of the rock record is forever if we get it back here on earth we can interrogate it we can we can create theories on hey we might see different types of life than we expected the record is here to continue that discussion and then eventually prove your theories or disprove them and and tell us about what mars could have could have uh harbored life in its past so at the risk of stating the obvious the geologists can see back in time simply because the stratification of geologic forms and structures preserves that and that is their analog to what we do in astrophysics whereas we look out in space we look back in time yes because light takes time to reach us so the farther away we look we can see a thousand years into the past a million even a billion so i've always felt geologists were our kindred souls one looked at looks down the other looks up in this exercise of decoding the history yeah so in the same analogy you know astrophysicists look at different frequencies of light all right because it tells them different things when we bring this rock record back we're going to use different instruments to determine the mineralogy in other words how material is put together the composition of what those nodes are in the mineralogy the the state of the matter in terms of uh you know what we call isotopes and so now we can interrogate all those different dimensions because we have the rock record right here at home so it's a bit of so it's geochemistry geochemistry all in yeah so neil uh do astrophysicists ever interrogate the light that they find from when they're when they're studying one day one day we'll do an explainer video of all stuff we extract from light yeah and it is a stupefying amount of information it's amazing contained within light yeah yeah yeah well we'll do that chuck remind me no use holding out on us x-rays we know what you did okay we know where you've been more than the gamma rays you got to watch out for exactly they're right over your shoulder there all right now give me another question maybe we can squeeze one in before we uh go to the break okay okay this is rob carter he says hello i was wondering what protection this rover has from the mars fine dust after the mars digger issues last month this is somebody who's following along that's for sure uh is there a way of stopping the dust from gathering on the solar panels and if so what's another major issue that the rover will have to overcome and we will only learn about that after the commercial break see what i did there all right can't wait stay tuned when we come back more cosmic queries on star talk all about perseverance on mars we're back star talk cosmic queries perseverance speaking of perseverance i have something completely unrelated to the topic of today this morning took my 92 year old mom to get her covet vaccine yeah that's amazing up in harlem hospital so so there it is 92 and she's ready she's ready for more she's ready to rock and roll now she's ready to rock and roll she's like neal where are we going where are we going now let's go we're gonna get out of that show i said ma i ain't been i don't get my shot yet okay my category hasn't come up yet okay so when we laughed left off rob carter had asked about the protection of the mars rover from the very fine dust of mars citing the digger issues of last month uh we might i don't know what that is and then he says is there a way of stopping uh the solar panels from gathering dust as well and what other issues have you foreseen that the rover will overcome so those are all of his questions kind of boom so indeed here's a model of perseverance looks just like curiosity and it has its own power system it's using radio isotope power it's using plutonium 238 and plutonium-238 is really hot you put this against a thermal couple which creates a voltage difference which charges a battery and then it's like having your iphone plugged in the wall all the time all your instruments work so this can be coated with dust we don't care because we've brought our own power supply and you work at night as well it doesn't matter if the sun is up or down okay but what's really exciting uh from the question um i i think your listener is interested in what's happening also with insight which has solar panels and the solar panels of course will accumulate dust but one really exciting thing that this insight the name of the the name of the lander on mars is steam is the dust is being blown off and it's not from it's not from uh you know the twisters that it has seen spirit and opportunity does but it's from the same phenomena it's just not visible so the atmosphere has these vortices that indeed blow the the dust away and we don't need a dust devil to do it okay well okay but how about the how about the machinery and the moving parts you know you can't bring anything to the beach here on earth because sand might get in it and that ruins ever it ruins everything you assume you don't want to ride a bicycle on the sand so won't the dust get inside the the moving parts and isn't that bad well that's a good point but indeed the the rover is really sealed well and in the compartments uh that it has uh like curiosity would be meant to acquire material and then shut off so um uh we don't see that as a problem you know it's like keeping your your windows up and your car doors shut all right and and you can operate well inside even during snow storms so jim remind me what insight was well insight is a lander that landed on mars in november 2018 and deployed a seismic system that allows us to hear mars quakes and it's measured over 500 of them since then and this is telling us a lot about the inside of mars and the fact that we now believe that mars at least partial part of the core is liquid we didn't know that before so jim if we're measuring the atmosphere the surface looking for life places where there is water and the inside of mars what what are you actually planning what's the long-term objective here well we need to know how active mars is let's say you go there build a structure and then there's a mars quake that tears it down so it's really all about understanding how to live and work on that planetary surface but from a planetary perspective we want to know how it's put together so that we can become martian overlords that's the goal here i'm starting to get the feeling that you scientists are planning a trip without the rest of us i'm just saying it's a little frightening chuck keep going all right give it to go let's go to we'll keep him moving we'll go to woody woody says this hey what's the top speed on this would you have a last name nope that's it does he have a last name i think he's the cowboy from the pixar movies i don't know i i'm serious he just says okay so what's the question he said what's the top speed on this bad boy that's it all right so let me demonstrate it okay so if this is the rover this is the top speed all right so your hand is slowly because some people will only be listening to this fitness center so so your hands are going like one mile an hour inches per second he's moving with the alacrity of a galapagos turtle right now that's basically that's what that's what it looks like okay no so if they're turtles on mars they'll look and say what's wrong with you you got wheels like the race we would love that race six wheels to a martian turtle come on man rover versus galapagos turtus that'll be good good all right all right um let's go to mikey taylor from illinois he says or is it illinois or is it illinois illinois isn't it french is it wait is it illinois french so that this the trailing continent is silent in france illinois okay illinois anyway he says uh villanois okay well maybe it's not french i don't know but if it is you leave off the s and if it is france then all the people in illinois actually shop at target okay exactly so mikey taylor says how do rovers uh most sensitive instruments survive entry and is there a chance that they can be damaged i like that yeah it's that's a really important question because we now know that we have to build them to be rugged so understanding that right off the bat is critical in developing the right capability to survive what we call the vibrations and the loads that occur by moving quickly you know so there's the launch sequence and the shaking of the rocket and and moving it high g uh and then there's the landing you know where we're going to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface in seven minutes under going through various loads so once you know that you have to design it and build it that way and then test it right so so you have a bunch of shock absorbers for everything built into the structure of the system right otherwise that the that uh the accelerations will be felt directly by the the instruments themselves you want to absorb that away somehow i guess that's what that's the task well that's one method of doing that you know yeah other methods are let it shake and then you have to build it such that it will withstand those vibrations oh [Laughter] forgive me i hadn't thought about build the sucker so that it can shake and bake and then it doesn't matter then you don't have to waste weight on building cushions for it that's interesting i like that i like that idea okay cool all right this is st20ic says will this take better quality photos so are we talking iphone 5 or iphone 12 pro what are we looking at what are we looking at photo wise we're indeed looking at the beautiful mars photos in higher resolution we're also having a high resolution cameras on the end of the arm so that we can get up really close to the rocks hit them with x-ray look at the glow and image that and really understand a lot about the mineralogy and the composition before we decide to drill a hole and bring back that sample wait is that that famous alpha proton x-ray it's similar yeah it's similar this is called a pixel and it's designed to zap the rock with x-rays let it fluoresce but also image it also image that okay so is that an acronym for something pixel yeah because i'm going to tell you something in the name department you guys are losing alpha proton alpha proton uh x-ray x-ray spectrometer geologists love that that instrument because it sounds like it sounds like my tax dollars went to do something and you know you gotta you gotta hype it up jim you gotta hype it up you can't just be like so we got this great technology it's called pixel uh you know no you gotta hype it up you know we can make it sound like a diabolical weapon on batman right alpha beta you know okay aqua do loop something all right so so this instrument sits on the end of the arm and fires a ray gun at really high intensities glowing the rock heating it up and letting it tell us what it what it's made of give that man an extra billion dollars just for that sentence we're going to call it our photo phaser spectrum phaser it's our final phaser spectrograph like something yeah just make it sound like something that would be on batman that's that man's utility belt it's not the ray gun on stein you know it's on kill it's on vaporize yes vaporize nice all right chuck we're in lightning round mode right now so how many can see how many questions you can get through and jim you're in sound bite mode pretend you're on the evening news and you we we can only give them one or two sentences okay here we go samuel king wants to know this tell the truth jim is this one of the first steps to terraforming mars could be and the reason why is we're going to learn so much about the environment that will then take that knowledge to terraform mars okay foundational knowledge i like that good sound bite too get a plus on that sound bite nice okay chuck give me another all right seisio seisio wants to know this how do you guys pick the right place to land we want to go to the best place where we can get samples and that's why we're going to a delta an ancient area on mars where water and sediment is landed on the bottom and created rock a delta like the mississippi delta guaranteed to have layers because it's been sedimented nice and and the and implicit theories of course mars has deltas right this is wow this is an interesting fact all right delta's enough for you to pick one to land on okay keep going chuck that's why i love the martian blues okay so uh selku killman one says this what will happen to the other rovers will they just retire and leave it there as space trash all rovers and all instruments that are working on mars we want to keep them working keep making new and exciting discoveries until they die and they will be there for us to explore as humans when we land and in fact you might need those to beam signals back to earth the way uh matt damon mark watney yeah his name mark watney yeah yeah yeah so you need those yeah yeah you need those in case you have to rewire them and send signals back to earth of course duh okay chuck keep it going a couple more we've got time for a couple more all right here we go this is uh beer games who says hello will this rover be responsible for any preparation for humans to travel to mars so the answer is yes because we have an experiment that brings in the atmosphere and creates oxygen that we can breathe you know it's called the oxygenator on the movie the martian but we call it moxie on perseverance once again it sounds a little better i was going to say once again you guys got to work on these terms man come on yeah yeah and we'll be back to get it so you so what you're doing is you're breaking apart the carbon dioxide molecule right right okay all right this is chris cherry if you want chris cherry says what is for this mission your chief and primary goal and what is something you secretly hope to discover we want to search the past from the rock record to see if mars could have supported life and my secret wish is that we find it a fossil bone sticking out of the rock i mean what like what do you what do you what what so we don't creature that falls out from under a rock no we don't anticipate getting fossils but the chemical composition is just right for which you know there there's potential uh cells or microbial uh uh indications that uh life could have survived on mars early on in its history so jim i'm gonna take host privileges and just ask the last question here uh we launched perseverance to mars was it uh june was it 2020 what july and did anyone else launch at around that time because you know this is the the months over which earth and mars are are nicely configured for just that can we shoot them down if they beat us well we have we have the lasers but they're going to be used on mars [Music] every 26 months neil you're right everything lines up where we can launch from earth and make it to mars as fast as possible but we are not the only nation going so the chinese have launched a mission to mars with an orbiter and a lander and a rover all right and in addition to that united arab emirates has also launched a mission that will get into orbit and make atmospheric measurements and image the surface so the road to mars is open and it's busy and are we collaborating are we sharing information with these with everybody to art i mean you scientists all love each other so i mean we do is that is that happening or is it more like governments no indeed everyone knows about the other missions we know when they're going to launch we know how they're going to operate you know for for instance perseverance is going to be dropped right onto the surface you know we're not going to get into orbit so it's like hitting a golf ball in new york and having uh the ball go in a hole in la you know it's just one straight shot the chinese have a different approach there they will first get in orbit spend some time there and then drop their capsule with their rover down to the surface at a later time everybody has different tactics there are different tactics yeah this is great and it's a reminder that science really at the end of the day knows no national boundaries because it is the one true unifying language not only of us all but between us and what might be aliens that we greet one day because they will surely be using the same science we are to get around the house and around the backyard and that's great as long as america wins what's the check american all right we got to end it there uh jim green great to have you back on star talk and uh if we can reach out to you for other nasa activities that'd be great of course it's always good knowing that you're there anytime chuck tweeting at chuck nice comic thank you yes yes i am all right uh neil degrasse tyson you're a personal astrophysicist as always beating you [Music] you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 233,233

Rating: 4.9401426 out of 5

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

Id: Dsmo8rpyo8g

Length: 54min 4sec (3244 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021