We Will Be Martians

[Music] in the third millennium BCE early astronomers from Mesopotamia mapped the Stars giving names to constellations and planets they called the Red Planet Nergal after their God of War for the ancient Greeks the celestial body was likewise their God of War Ares ancient Romans gave it the name we use today Mars over a thousand years later in 1609 Galileo used the newly invented telescope to get a closer look at the red planet by the 19th century advanced telescopes allowed astronomers to see details of the planet's surface they saw what came to be thought of as vast canals surely evidence of civilization people became fascinated with the idea of life on Mars and then in 1964 we did something those Mesopotamian astronomers could only have dreamed of we sent a craft the Mariner 4 on a 228 day journey to orbit the Red Planet Viking 1 touched down on July 20th 1975 and sent back the first images from the Martian surface on NBC Nightly News astronomer Carl Sagan reacted to this unprecedented feat with a characteristically broad perspective I think it gets to something very deep in in human nature the the will to explore the lust discovery the curiosity I think is something built extremely deeply into us as a central part of our nature and the earth is all explored here is a way with inexpensive machines of extending ourselves beyond our planet we since landed seven more objects on Mars to study topography and geography and in the process learned that those canals which incited such a frenzy turned out to be nothing more than an optical illusion NASA landed the insight Lander on Mars in November 2018 to finally explore the interior structure of the four-and-a-half billion year old planet and give us a greater understanding of all planetary evolution including that of our own [Music] the next step may have been inevitable since those ancient Mesopotamians first began to look up from NASA to the United Arab Emirates to the private company SpaceX several disparate plans are underway for us to make the greatest journey in our history as a species [Music] will we get there Carl Sagan thought so maybe we're on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there the gates of the Wonder world are opening in our time or maybe we're on Mars because we have to be because there is a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process we come after all from under gatherers and for 99.9% of our tenure on earth we've been Wanderers and the next place to wander to is Marx but whatever the reason you're on Mars is I'm glad you're there and I wish I was with you [Music] [Applause] [Music] we are going to Mars humans we humans are going to Mars there's a there's a bunch of different plans to do that Elon Musk says these will get there 2024 2025 NASA makes it more like 20 30 maybe even 2040 it ain't cheap musk who's going to send a crew of 12 says the cost will be more than 10 billion with a B per person other estimates eclipse five hundred billion so we can't exactly afford that here at the World Science Festival but we can take a hypothetical trip to Mars and that's what we're going to do here this evening giving all of us a sense of what it might be like to take that long dreamed of destination and of course to take that journey through space we're going to need a crew so let's bring them out Trekkies take note we all know that a spaceship Nietzschean and needs an engineer and we need our own captain janeway and we have her at NASA she has worked with boosters with environmental control and life support systems spacesuits and extra vehicular activity tools she currently leads the Mars integration group developing crewed Mars missions concepts please welcome Michelle Rucker [Applause] a ship's a doctor on our ship is also necessary and ours was a colonel in the United States Air Force where she served as a senior flight surgeon prior to her selection to the NASA astronaut corps in 1996 at NASA's Ames Research Center she was the lead astronaut science liaison and strategic relationships manager for Google and other Silicon Valley programmatic partnerships say hello to dr. Yvonne Cagle [Applause] our science officer is not a Vulcan but she knows about volcanoes she is the principal investigator on the NASA funded Hawaii space exploration analog and simulation project or high-seas which conducts long-duration space exploration simulations on Mauna LOA's on Hawaii a planetary geologist and specialist in AI please welcome Kim Binsted we couldn't go anywhere without our ships captain ours was the chief scientist at NASA for more than 25 years working on missions including the exploration of Mars Venus and Saturn she is currently director of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum please welcome Ellen stofan what a fail welcome to all of you and to all of you and I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge something that is of course obvious but certainly bears noting for more than a millennia Mars the planet has been associated with men to the extent that the symbol for male is the symbol for Mars tonight we change that eat your heart out Mark Watney this is the future so our journey tonight has three stages like like every interplanetary journey a stage one is going to be the launch stage two is the voyage stage three our new home and of course we're going to start with where we have to start which is the launch how to get us off of this planet and onto that one more than a hundred million miles away we know how most Rockets how old Rockets have launched you light a match you burn something up it goes right a little explosion and you're off works just fine has worked so far but Michelle there are some drawbacks to the standard launch approach for Mars is that right what what should we be looking at instead of what we've looked at in the past so so chemical propulsion is what we typically use that's it's been a good standby for economy of scale we like to launch bigger and bigger systems the the system that NASA is developing now the the Space Launch System is a heavy lift capability that's what we'll need to get a lot of stuff either to the moon or to Mars you can launch a lot of little bitty rockets but that's it's it's nice to be able to get some big systems up there too so that so the SLS is in work several of our commercial partners are also working on on similar chemical rocket propulsion systems there are some and you're gonna ask me go ahead and ask me ask me the question I wasn't going to get there yes about space elevator I mean we got to get there but we'll get there on one second let me before we do that what's what percentage of the weight on a rocket is fuel I mean the fuel is the biggie when you're taking off yeah it depends on which fuels you're using who Yvonne probably has the the numbers in her head for the shuttle I don't have them off set up my head I know the shuttle for itself I don't know the exact number but I know the most of the energy most of the power is just in the making escape velocity get out of the atmosphere right so is there a reason why we can't do it the same old way to get to Mars as we've done with the shuttles we've done it with everything else oh we can sure we can but we got to go a lot further we have to go a lot further we have to take a lot of stuff with us as a longer journey so we just need more stuff okay that's what that's what a heavy lift is important to be able to get a large amount of equipment the supplies that we'll need for a long-term okay now I'll ask space elevator it's such an exotic concept the idea of an elevator into space is it real is it science fiction so I'm not an expert on the technology but my understanding is it's a conceptually it would work there's some limitations in the materials right now there's a lot of research and development being done NASA did a report back in 2010 on Sky I think sky hooks in space elevators and found that the materials advancement just isn't quite there yet for being able to make that a reality from for earth potentially it would work on the moon as well but right now there's a materials advancement it's just adjust up but can you give us the I hate to say the elevator speech for the space elevator what's the what's the short version of exactly how it works it's basically a tether with a counterweight on the end so that begs a lot of questions about operations here on earth traffic management would be a problem very long tether I at one point in my career I worked on hypervelocity impacts of spacecraft with space debris or micro meteoroids so I would worry about the tether being impacted if if the tethers damaged what's your what's your backup plan so there's a lot of technical challenges right now NASA doesn't currently have a space elevator in the plans but if anybody has a really good idea for you the materials advancement I would encourage you to go to Internet browser and look up NASA it's NS NS RTF NASA space research technology fellowships NASA supports a graduate student research we're always looking for for clever ideas and new technologies new advancements and materials and different concepts so we would love to hear some great ideas I hate to ask but are you suggesting that we don't know how we're going to get there thing is now there's all these private companies that are helping to reduce the cost to low-earth orbit you know SpaceX blue origin and if we can start reducing the cost to low-earth orbit that's gonna help bring the cost of getting to Mars down right go ahead Yvonne and for all you Trekkie fans the old beam me up Scottie and believe the space elevator is using microwave beam power to help sort of accelerate a vehicle up the tether and now one of one of the interesting things is the materials advancements that would need to be made to make a space elevator work those materials could also be applied to traditional chemical propulsion systems as well so it's it's not necessarily one or the other the the technologies might support either or or something nobody has even thought of yet okay so that's one possibility space elevator another possibility the lunar orbital platform Gateway what's that about oh yeah so um Gateway is a concept that nASA has been working on for about five years and the idea is can we start to break that independence from the earth and go out to the vicinity of the Moon go into a lunar orbit and basically have a smaller scale space station that would be sort of the test vehicle for the transfer vehicle that would get you to Mars so we need to make some improvements on the space station we need to make sure the systems are a reliable life support is one of the most critical systems so let's go test all those systems out in the vicinity of the moon get where we can get home in three days if there's a problem and then we'll go on to Mars after some you know a couple years of testing in lunar orbit then we'll be ready to go on to Mars it's also a great platform to use to them to send down to the lunar surface if companies or countries want to go down to the lunar surface it's a great platform to do that from so we know how to get to the moon we haven't lived on the moon we've only gotten there this is the moon base to Mars idea they would set up a base and then is the idea that we would go from the moon to Mars or is it that the moon just gives us a sense of how to function before we move on to Mars you know people have looked at different architectures because obviously when you when you're on a long term long time voyage to Mars remember it takes seven to eight months to get to Mars where I know we're gonna talk about that in a minute but you're gonna want a multi module craft because you're always gonna want to have somewhere to retreat to if something goes wrong and think Apollo 13s so the idea is are we gonna construct that vehicle in lunar orbit out by the Gateway and leave from lunar orbit which is a lot less energy than trying to leave from Earth orbit so people have looked at different different scenarios leaving from lunar orbit just takes less energy so it's a lot easier we're not doing this alone are we this is we are now in the public-private world of space exploration both SpaceX and Blue Origin have ways to get to the moon on the way to Mars that would talk about that a little bit Allen how much how much is it going to be a partnership I think it's gonna be an incredible partnership and you actually saw that on the Gateway slide you saw all those different acronyms up there what those were were all the different space agencies of the world so the European Space Agency the Japanese Space Agency is JAXA the Russian space agency wants to get involved the Canadian space so all of our partners from the international space station want to go onto the moon and on to Mars and even countries that haven't been involved in the space station everybody wants this to be an international effort and then on top of that we have all these private companies so I think it's gonna be Internet national it's gonna be public private and frankly that's the only way I think we're going to get there this is a big change certainly from the days of the race to the moon and our rivalry with the then Soviet Union today we're seeing a very different thing Yvonne I wonder what the feeling is in the astronaut corps about the idea that this is a global enterprise rather than USA and a flag and all that it's very exciting it's an opportunity to be collaborative and we recognize that the space race is no longer between countries but actually between industries and technology and capability and if we work together we can synergize and really go further faster longer there was a time when we all believed I think that NASA was the only place that had the kind of technology that we trusted and that we believed in that's also changed that well I mean how does NASA work with private companies now in order to keep that level so high and there and keep the safety so high well fortunately NASA and the whole international effort of going to space is something that everyone has a part of so the people are globally and we're taking that global expertise and no longer centralizing it at NASA but decentralizing it into industry and other areas and so what this actually does is that that expert talent is something that we can outsource but I don't mean outsource by taking it outside the agency or the country but by taking it off planet and what we can demonstrate off planet we can bring back and actually help us here with our lives in our environment right here on earth okay let's get back to the actual launch Michelle the determination has to be made at some point what time to launch and exactly when to launch how do you make that determination what are the factors that go into that so to go to Mars so Mars and Earth chase each other around the Sun there are different orbits and they're traveling at different speeds and about every 26 months there's an optimum alignment where you have the minimum amount of energy needed to get from Earth to Mars which means they're closest not necessarily closest so the analogy we like to use is if you're passing a ball to someone you don't someone who's running you don't aim it where they're at now you aim it where they're going to be right when you think the ball will arrive and how hard you throw the ball is equivalent to how hard we have to throw our spaceships you can throw it harder but it takes more energy and that translates into more equipment or more propellant right it could be more money so you want to be able to do the easiest throw that you can do and that happens about every 26 months every 26 months is there also a time of day and what if that every 26 month is bad weather I mean do you have a window yeah there's a several days of window on either side of that the optimum time but only several days I think I've it kind of depends on which system each each opportunity is a little bit different and it varies a little bit from year to year okay we're going to move on now to the actual voyage we have now figured out how to get there whether it's the elevator or whether it's some combination of the elevator and or heavy-lift and whatever we're now on our way whether we've gone from the moon or from here let's talk about this trip first of all give or take 100 million miles is that right 140 hundred million something like that so the the number we like to use is if you look at the odometer on your spaceship to get to Mars and back again it's about two thousand times as far as going from here to the moon the the numbers themselves are so big they're hard to wrap your head around sometimes but two thousand times as far as it is to the moon that sort of puts it into perspective and that's the round-trip journey Yvonne let me start with you we're now on this voyage we're now going to Mars how long is it going to take Wow well it depends if we're doing it with or without a lunar assist which is basically your slingshot my preference is a slingshot but if we were to do with the traditional way we're looking at somewhere around nine months when we put Landers or probes or vehicles it's been about you know not quite a year maybe somewhere between six to eight months but for humans since we have to take a little longer route we're looking at nine months traditionally if we do something that is more of a vehicle energy boost we can get it down to six months but then you're basically a human projectile having a gravity assist that's accelerating you into the Martian atmosphere through the atmosphere into a very kind of accelerated landing back up for a second why do humans why does it take longer longer to sent humans partly because of the human body itself and also because of the kind of weight and supplies the extra weight that will weight mass since there's no weight in space mass it will be carrying so when you put on human bodies or stuff that you're taking both I like that less now that we have 3d printers so we'll be able to sort of manufacture things additive manufacturing where we're going so we just have to bring the component materials but they're still going to be some gear and quipment that we'll need to - let's let's talk about the stuff what are we taking with us who wants to talk about what we're taking along let me just go back a little bit to what you've unsaid so the biggest thing we've landed on Mars to date it was the Curiosity rover that's about one metric ton with its like the size of a [Music] something yeah you all know about curiosity of course the wonderful sweet little Rover that's a TV like a TV okay fine so this is that biggest thing we've landed successfully on Mars so if you want to land a crew of four now the rover didn't need a life-support system it didn't need you know food it didn't didn't need a potty so the humans are gonna need a lot more stuff stop that let these guys talk a little bit more about this stuff but we're thinking on the order of about 20 times as much mass as curiosity for a human-scale Lander so it's a it's a it's a bit of a jump in size go ahead cam so a lot of the heaviest things that we're going to need to send our things like food and water as well as all the equipment to keep humans alive and so that's why one of the factors in these mission designs that's so important is Institute resource utilization and what I mean by that is if you have to bring all of the water to get your crew there to keep them alive on Mars and to bring them back home again that's a lot of water and that'll severely affect the mission parameters but if you can send ahead an automated system that can extract some of the water that's already on Mars and make it usable for humans then that cuts out roughly two-thirds of what you need and that's that's that makes a huge difference and it makes some of these missions much more fees but that's still a piece of equipment somehow or some version of a machine that has to be sent there right but you'd want to send it first because you'd want to be really really really sure that it's working so before before we have launched us we're doing this hypothetical trip here five of us and all of you by the way so before we've launched have we sent up a bunch of stuff yes almost certainly that has stuff that has unpacked itself or is it waiting for us dumping it's unpacked itself it has hopefully extracted water it's hopefully taken some of that water and taken extract some oxygen from it and hopefully has generated enough fuel to send us back again so that when we get there our ship home is already waiting ready to go so this is all robotic obviously so we said so we're sending our our home our our water system and a bunch of other things they have this power you need power to run all of the robotics so so surface power ends up being a really key one of the first elements how many launches before the humans launch for one mission it's you know the estimates have been anywhere from four to eight launches and obviously you could go up as much as you want it just depends on exactly how much you're trying to you know pre position and this is all of the assumption that nobody there is going to wreck the stuff that we're sending up there okay no little green people we're good an opportunity we're only supposed to survive on Mars for ninety days and look at how long they survive so robotic precursor missions will go you know up to two years before we actually landed up to two years oh so we could start sending them soon ish yes okay especially this issue in fact the Mars 2020 Rover is actually going to do this first practice of in situ resource utilization it's actually gonna be pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and basically putting it in a tank that's a really simple first step but it's a first step towards this so we're already about to start practicing this but the longer we have system is in place to start extracting water extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere the better off we're going to be exciting okay let's get back to our actual we're now in the ship we're on our way Yvonne let me get back to the medical stuff start with radiation oh we know about radiation it's worse the further the closer to the Sun obviously but the further up what are the dangers what are we dealing with well it's interesting that you talk about that actually the the most the greatest risk we have of radiation exposure is actually closer to the planet than you would expect because it's the GCR Tsar galactic cosmic rays and this is just a kind of hosh Posche of a lot of ionized material that's very close just outside our atmosphere between earth and the moon so actually the moon has a greater risk of exposure than the deeper we go into space now the deeper we go into space close son now you have your alpha particles and solar flares and a lot more penetrating and damaging radiation so it's just kind of do you want the direct hit or do you want kind of the ripple effect and what do we know about radiation exposure on Mars itself well the atmosphere is much thinner and so we're going to definitely need to protect ourselves and what we've looked at is shielding the vehicle the route there is really even a greater risk so shielding let's stick to that for now then okay so how do we shield ourselves on the way there and and is there a danger to the vehicle as well as to ourselves yes both both the greatest the best radio protectant is water but obviously the up mass of that is not just cost prohibitive but we just can't bring enough water for that to that end we're looking at things like titanium we're looking at different complex or carbon composites lots of different materials that can be radio protective even when we get to the moon the regolith which is a soil on the moon is somewhat radio protective as well the big challenge will be on Mars with having such a thin atmosphere how do we best protect ourselves and that'll influence where we place our habitat will it be on the surface or will it be somewhere beneath the surface where we can have some protection from the radiation okay we'll get to that but when we get there we're not there yet we're still only transition phase one of the things they've been looking at and this is even for the lunar gateway but then certainly for the Mars transfer vehicle is if you if you actually did take enough water because obviously we've got to take water let's use it smart if you line where the crew are sleeping with protective water that way you far reduce if they're say 12 hours a day they're in a radiation protective area it reduces overall risk but you can't do that in the ship on the way to the entire ship but you can't around the sleep quarters the whole way yeah so a water barrier a water barrier just around this water feature as we say exactly another thing we're looking at is just the the cargo the consumables the food for example storing that in a way where you take advantage of the because that could also get damaged by radiation or not so much food food is pretty sturdy and okay deliberately a radiate food on earth so that's true Evon one more for you before I move on to Kim and the psychological issues Ivonne there the space stew I assess the space station has given us an opportunity to learn about individuals humans living in space mark and Scott Kelly famously the twins study when one of them was on in the ISS and one was on earth what have we learned that helps us know how to manage our bodies for this eight to ten month journey to Mars well very quickly let me characterize besides being a human aquarium surrounded by water so that your radio protected the other way that you can protect yourself from radiation is to actually have your stem cells drawn before you leave the planet and basically have them carried with you preserve them and be able to sort of harvest them and replant them if we were to take a big radiation hit so we would quarantine ourselves for several weeks or more and then slowly allow our bones kind of to rehire vest our blood supply and give us back that immunity because that's where radiation does affect us it reduces our immune capacity along with some other conditions the other thing that can happen is when you first go into space your blood volume starts to float towards your head and it congest your ears and kind of gives you this kind of foggy space brain initially but over time it can affect your your your focus to some degree but your a vision you can become more farsighted we're seeing the other things that can happen is it can change your taste and actually make foods and medicines harder to absorb because of some of the congestion that happens in your stomach so how do we guard against that well the important thing and Kim will talk about it is being very smart about our nutrition changing it up so that we don't get space anorexia which comes from appetite fatigue eating the same thing same texture same colors over time the other thing that we can do is find different ways to administer medicines maybe through the nose nasal sprays as opposed to having to ingest it in some cases if we get sick or injured our surgeries need to be done through a tube so that we're able to contain our body fluids you can just like somebody open in microgravity everything floats absolutely and the other concern is certainly with our bones demineralizing or thinning out and our muscles weakening that affects our heart and our ability to exercise our exercise tolerance and that can very much not only affect our performance but if we were to get injured if we were to strain a muscle or ligament or break a limb we're going to heal very slowly and that might be enough time to slow down our resiliency and our strength and turn us from a Mars visitor to a pioneering Mars welcome-wagon committee but we don't come home as quickly as we would have anticipated which is not necessarily a bad thing but why all the things you're describing are are as a result of what we've learned about long-duration space travel and so we know how to deal with some of the physical issues that may affect our bodies Kim let me turn to you now we've you know the five of us I've had lovely chats in the green room we get along just fine for you know the last hour we're going to be on this spaceship for eight to ten months Kim how do you figure out the optimal cruise so that we don't close each other's eyes out it's a real problem you know if you were to so I run a Mars analog habitat in Hawaii and what we do is we take groups of six people and we put them in a habitat and have them pretend that they're on Mars for four to twelve months and we pick people who are very astronaut like in their psychology because one thing we already know is if you just picked six people off the street and did this they would be killing each other within days what's what's an astronaut like psychology well there's a lot of a lot of different tests but colleague summarized it as thick skin long fuse in an optimistic outlook and to that for a Mars trip I would add easily entertained because if you really need to go clubbing every weekend or if you you know need to meet new people or need to go climb a mountain every day you're you're not gonna have a good trip so you know the kind of personality types you need what about putting together a crew we need one of these one of these one of the how do you do that so yeah you're gonna need a bunch of different skill sets you're also gonna need not an addition to the technical skill sets a bunch of different approaches to conflict resolution to leadership followership and so on so I like to liken it to a toolbox if you're filling a toolbox you wouldn't filled it with hammers even if they were all the world's best hammers and you also wouldn't fill it with Swiss Army knives because there's a compromise that comes with having all of those identical sets of skills instead you want to have people with strengths in different areas with different life experiences with different approaches to interpersonal reaction interactions and so on and that's that's really how you go how about relatives is a good okay I'll give you two at once relatives marriages okay so I'm not turning it down completely but there's some risks with that as you might imagine and one of the risks is a rift with the rest of the crew if two people have a very close relationship that could break them off into a subset and you really don't want to cause those rifts in any way another way you caused rifts is by having sort of clustering so for example imagine you had a crew of three men and three women three people from a civilian background and three from a military background a three engineers three scientists fine that sounds all right but we don't want to have is three female civilian scientists and three male military engineers because they're gonna split into those two groups so you try and avoid those kind of alignments as much as possible so that I think is the risk with those kind of close relationships that you're talking about what about in day let's say eight we have a fight they're not gonna have it in day eight I'm betting at about the six-month mark that's what we see in our simulations basically you know you've got these people who are actually really good at getting along with each other they've got a lot of these interpersonal skill sets because you work at it I mean you think about this and you're yeah we can do that we can work at this what we found I think NASA would have loved it if we could have come back and said look avoid factor X and you won't have any conflict but it's just not the case anytime you have a group of people together for that long you're gonna have conflict and it comes from all sorts of different sources interpersonal issues stresses from back home disagreements over something important but what you really do need is to have this resilience to conflict you need to have individuals in a group of people who could have a conflict and then come back from it and return to a high functioning state and is there some kind of chain of command that's important like a military chain of command yes there'll be a chain of command we haven't found that the style of command matters all that much you could have the military very hierarchical style or you could have a more consensus driven style but one thing that's really important is that the style is agreed on right and that your leader and your followers share the same style or can share the same style is it a democracy or is it somebody's in charge I voted is what you're looking for but I I imagine that any commander on this kind of mission is going to have to be good at listening to the rest of the crew okay Ellen and Michelle talk about what we may have learned from Mir the then Soviet space station and ISS what have we learned about people getting along together Ellen well we've certainly learned how to live in space I mean a lot of the lessons that we've learned from high seas are the exact same lessons we've learned in space it's how do we get along how do we get past conflict how do we understand roles in abilities how do you bring people together from different cultures to solve problems and how do we get all these systems to work reliably and that's obviously been what we've been doing up on the ISS and I it blows my mind we've had what now 17 continuous years of living in space continuously they're up above us it's it's amazing and if anybody hasn't ever looked at the appspot the station if you if you google the website and about every two weeks the ISS comes over New York City and you can look up and you can see it you can wave to them I can't see you but it's incredible to me you look up there and you say ah there's six humans in space above us how magical is that one thing I'd like to add to that is as you suggested the space systems are systems of systems and subsystems and subsystems and the human systems are part of that so if the human part of that system of systems breaks it can be just as catastrophic as if the rocket blows up right so we need to understand how these all these things work together and test them over these years and years of operations well surely one of us is going to have a bad day but worse than that there could be actual mental health issues depression doctor what do we do about that well for one thing the sleep deprivation so when we're in space we were sleeping last there's lots of excitement going on there's lots of work and sleep deprivation can make I don't know tolerances and coping ability it starts to erode it over time right so sleep is one of the most important and not just number of hours deep restorative sleep and that means you have to adjust the lighting during the day but also during sleep it means that you have to exercise to keep your body and your whole lymphatic system mobilized in moving so that you can really refresh in detox and be able to be restful when you do go to sleep nutrition is a very important part of it and all of these things along with diversion and some distraction or on the entertainment side can really help to keep people from getting too wrapped around the axle and keep things sort of restored and refreshed so that's the most important thing of all what have we learned from the this continuous occupation a habitation in space what have we learned about entertainment what works what's a good thing to tell people to bring it varies but things like exercise that's probably the best of all movement then it would have to be some sort of artist artistic persuasion something along the lines of music or writing looking out the window taking pictures finding some way to express and share and communicate attachment having some connection with family and friends and and even what's happening in the news on earth is very important to that sense of attachment and then just being able to which means communication back to earth has to be established it has to be continuous right for our 8 to 10 months trip to Mars do we have constant communication with earth not constant often we lose our signals and when we reacquire that signal there can be communication delays and one more on moon on well moon there's three minutes in most cases but on Mars there's a 20 minute delay each way so you can have 4045 minutes before and that's something that you can make for an awkward conversation but it's not much different than on earth with some individuals but but I will say the one thing that's very important in terms of working together is having people on the crew going long-duration who are able to not just take space but give space so on shorter missions when it's two weeks long you can have someone who's a life for the party and entertaining but when it's two years long then you want someone who's able to give space in a very small environment and that's an art in itself that's its big decision go ahead Kim I just wanted to add we stumbled across an interesting way to stay in touch with home during high seas one of our crew her she'd brought some barrettes for her hair and they broke so she emailed her family and asked try and find a 3d printable barrette and they weren't able to find one or they found one and then they were able design pretty flowers on there and stuff that she liked they sent her the design and she printed it at the habitat so this is a way you could imagine you know your kid back home does an art project you scan it in and then you can print it out at the station so it's a way to go ahead speaking of broken equipment yes what we've learned on Space Station one of the most interesting things from from the work I did was when things would break initially in the space station we had what we call the orbital replacement units we would just bring the whole thing home on the shuttle send up a new one because the shuttle was going back and forth and it was fairly easy to do when the shuttle stopped flying with we had the accident and it was grounded we had to learn to repair things in orbit that weren't necessarily designed to be repaired and so when you're taking apart fine machinery with little tiny itty-bitty screws that they could be floating away from you in microgravity that's very challenging and so so it was a learning process we we would send the instructions to the crew in some cases we had video that would send up to them will you even get their families involved in some cases with you know to say hello and do the video and the repairs and one of the ones I remember was the the treadmill exercise is important and the treadmill had some problems and so we sent up the instructions the treadmill was taken apart on orbit and repaired on even though it was not meant to be right done that way but you figured out a way and we figured I would do that so so one of the challenges for going to Mars because it's such a long trip right if things break we can't just send a new no you've got to figure out what I'm thinking of the early shuttle days and the famous of the flyswatter when they had to reach reach a switch and and configured something that looked like a fly swatter to make it work that Rhea Seddon did which was quite a quite I mean very inventive these things can happen and yet to use what you have on board is okay that's what's one thing you can invent unless you have the right tools is food what are we going to eat on this trip now we're trying to pare it down as much as possible we can't take every single thing we want food well let me revisit this when we were actually on the surface of the planet because the food we're gonna be eating on the way is pretty similar to what they're using on ISS and it has to be because in microgravity it is really hard to cook you could put the food in the bowl and it floats out again so yeah pour your sauce on your pasta everywhere [Laughter] but let's revisit this when we get to the surface okay fine so you're going to assure me that there's room for all the prepackaged things that I'm gonna heat up in the little whatever they're heating up equipment is on the on the so for eight or ten months I'm gonna eat space food basically exactly dehydrated food that you just add water to and wash it up and it's kind of ready to eat but I will say this is one of the many areas where things we developed for space actually have a real and important value back here on earth because if you think of food that has to last for months and months if not years and be stable and not go bad and be able for example to be may be sent into disaster zones or places on earth where people are starving having NASA space food actually has huge benefits to people right here on earth that's another area when I talk to young people there's a perception that you have to be a rocket scientist to do what we do but there's a lot of different aspects of a spaceflight so if you like to cook food if anyone out there likes to cook you know food research shelf life stability just the packaging there's just a lot you don't have to be a rocket scientist to participate in a space mission that's that's kind of a key point that I try to talk with young people about you can be a space foodie and more let's talk about our home on the way there what does it look like what are we flying in I mean the original the original the mercury the Gemini capsules were pretty small shuttle was obviously larger are we somewhere in between are we bigger what's that what does it look like the vehicle it's gonna have to be bigger I mean there's because you're it's just too long and you've got to have a separate place where people can sleep you've got to have separate modules for safety purposes as I said earlier because you've got to have alternatives for people to go but the smaller it is the better can you get can any of you give me a design concept I mean there's something up on the screen now is it going to looks like sort of a dirigible or what what's it going to look like a blimp I mean one of the big debates is whether or not you try to simulate gravity so one way to do that is to well there's many ways one is the kind of wheel design that you saw in I think thousand one two thousand one had that another is a tethered system so you have your ship and maybe a weight or another ship and you world around like this but there's a lot of risks that come with that kind of spinning as you imagine if something goes wrong gone yeah a lot of the designs most of the designs we're looking at these days don't do the artificial gravity route although it would have a lot of health benefits right and if we're looking at you know Paul Ryan for example is a capsule and it's a smaller version so it's really going to have just travel writing space there's not going to be a lot of limp living work type of space going on and so one of the things that we've talked about and we're looking into is human hibernation putting us into suspended animation where our metabolic or physiologic our body rate is slowed way down sort of like if you were to do cold immersion so that we can sleep for the majority of it and then when it's time wake up get our systems going again and we're off and running with this precursor robotic precursor habitat that's just waiting with this fine beautiful feast in water and everything that will be the Welcome Wagon the Welcome I got it okay so all the way there incidentally is their constant fuel happening is their constant propulsion or are we somehow in a in an orbital field where we don't need that how what do we need to get there so there's a couple different options for for in space propulsion one of the ones really Gantt now would be used for free gateway the solar electric propulsion the the guys I work with the analogy they uses solar electric propulsion it's a it's a low thrust it's it's like being fifth gear in a car so it's a nice steady very efficient method and it's constant or it not necessarily you're making course corrections but when you need longer burns to do your maneuvering a solar electric is a very efficient way to do it chemical is is good it's like first gear in a car it gives you that oomph to get outta get out of traffic there we've been looking at hybrid systems that maybe take the best of both worlds in one package how about nuclear a nuclear is that's an option there's a lot of research being done on that so there are different different possibilities together there okay we're almost there now you got a Landis how do we land on the surface the tough part that's the hard part it's the hard part yeah entry descent and landing is going to be the hardest thing and the issue is that Mars has it obviously has a lot more gravity than the moon had but it also has an atmosphere but the problem with ours is atmosphere is there's enough of an atmosphere there to heat you up as you come in but there's not enough atmosphere there to really slow you down so if anybody's seen the great JPL video they put together before curiosity called seven minutes of Terror they really well explained that that terror of entering the Mars atmosphere so you have to really do things like how do you slow down when you're coming in at hypersonic speeds and it's it is not an insurmountable problem it's just tough and we've got to figure out how to do it for a lot more than the one metric ton of mass we landed at Curiosity where's them there's some really interesting technologies being developed there's an inflatable technology we call it the hi add the hyper hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator because we like really big words but then we just call it the high hat because nobody can say all that or then you make up an acronym that none of us can remember yeah so this is that's an inflatable technology there's another deployable basically deploying large surfaces to get you that that aerodynamic assist when you're when you're trying to enter and land retropropulsion that bets another we're used to that so yeah from Apollo it's certainly in Gemini one of these really an is for some of the some of the precision landing that we'll have to do on the moon can we take those technologies and mature them enough and then be able to use the same thing for Mars without having to start fresh for Mars you use as much of the technologies as possible but unlike the shuttle it will not land like an airplane on the surface of Mars because of the atmosphere there is one concept that looks something like that there's a we call it the mid L over D concept but there's a runway it would it would be more like a you know there'd be Rockets to slow you down when you got close so it's got to come in vertically or some version of that to the way we're used to seeing things it's gonna be some combination you know it like curiosity it's probably gonna use a combination of things to slow it down probably ending with parachutes but I always want to point out for as daunting as some of these things we're talking about seem like in this year fiftieth year of celebrating humans landing on the moon for the first time remember at where we started from and eight-and-a-half years later we were actually standing on the moon we we are so far ahead of understanding what exactly the engineering challenges are we're so far down the road on them though so I get I get stressed when people start thinking oh my gosh this is such a hard thing oh my God we're so far ahead of where we were when we started out in the moon okay we've done it oh maybe ten months in we're not we've landed and we've landed safely and we're here and our robotic earlier ships have set up everything that we need here we are first thing let's talk about is in order to simulate what we will be living in in this environment a number of places are building habitats to simulate what it would be like on Mars and I I think we have an image or the one of the many images the United Arab Emirates are planning to spend a hundred and forty million dollars to build a Martian prototype city outside of Dubai as preparation there are a number of these things happening in other parts of the world as well Kim you've done a lot of these simulations how long does one go into one of these simulations how long do they last it varies so at high seas we're one of the longer ones so our longest mission was 12 months how many people that six people in a small space about a thousand square feet so a smallish apartment in the rest of the world in New York it's mission the Russians did one for 520 days a few years back which is the longest one on record but there's also what we call serendipitous analogs so those are these mission like conditions that kind of happen by accident so that includes Antarctic exploration submarines jail populations to some extent and we've learned a lot from those as well and what have we learned well in addition to the stuff we were talking about earlier so one is the crew composition is really important another is that supporting crew over this time is really important do we have a separate living quarters you know we do at high seas and we think it's important to be able to separate sleeping quarters separate sleeping quarters that is so ours are very small there gosh I don't see anything comparable in size but a little bit bigger than a small single bed but they have a really key component which is a door that shuts and locks having that little bit of privacy that personal space is really important what's the describe the atmosphere atmosphere I mean in the in the broadest sense what's it like what does it look like on Mars what happens we've just landed what do we see sorry it'll be dusty it'll be dusty I'm kind of pink dusty right the dust from an engineering that's one of the engineering challenges if the dust coats our radiator panels our thermal systems won't be as efficient so we have to figure out how to keep the dust off the the radiators same with solar arrays if we if a coat solar arrays it'll reduce the efficiency is it dusty everywhere on Mars or just in certain areas there's seasonal dust storms we're getting a little bit better at it we're not predicting weather in Mars but we're sort of tracking things a little bit we you know we haven't been watching Mars that long and so you have to kind of look at it seasons over a long period of time to get the hang of the patterns but the dust storms seem to follow specific tracks and and they seem to be seasonal so that helps us kind of be able to predict what we have to deal with but but dust if you if you bring dust into your house it's kind of an annoyance just to keep it clean if you bring dust into your habitat and it gets into the seals and you try to close the door and this and the the internal pressure is leaking that could be a hazard so we have to pay a little bit of attention to that that's one of those things that we'll learn about on the moon alright but what are we fighting on Mars and I say fighting because we're humans were used to a certain set of circumstances that enable us to breathe to walk to live what have we got lay it out what's the situation on Mars hey kelan extreme temperatures so it never gets much above say the freezing point and it can get quite quite cold so that's certainly something we're gonna have to be conscious constantly aware of radiation so Mars doesn't unlike the earth does not have a magnetic field so that radiation we experienced in space okay it's not as as as bad maybe as at the moon but there's still a lot of radiation hitting you on the surface of Mars we've measured that with an instrument on the Curiosity rover so it's pretty well characterized let's see what else it's one of the things that I think is good is it's it's not that alien of a landscape you know if you've been out in the desert in Utah or some places in the Middle East I mean those landscapes on Mars which a lot of you saw on the Martian aren't that dissimilar the pressure is very different so we have to be in pressurized spacesuits all the time or in a pressurized it happens not in a pressurized spacesuit what have you done right quickly essentially your blood boil I mean yeah your blood boils and okay so if we're gonna live on Mars for any amount of time we must always be in a spacesuit or for outside and we must always be in a sealed environment of some kind to be inside to eat to sleep to work can't open the window or the door look let me just first ask the this the simplest question which is what does that do to the human psyche not to be able to breathe outside not to be able to go outdoors it's one of the things the Astros I mean Vaughn can talk about sooner than I can but it's one of the things when a lot of the astronauts will say when I'll say what's the thing you miss the most being on the space station and let's say the wind on the face the smell of the air the smell of rain so I can I hear so I did one of these missions up in the Canadian High Arctic so we were sealed in for four months not only going outside and spacesuit and when the mission was over we walked outside without our spacesuits and it was amazing it like you'd gone from a little black-and-white TV to this super high-def world and there wasn't much to smell but it was still a nice clean smell out there for an hour and then we went back into the habitat and it stank [Laughter] happy place and we hadn't realized it because of course we've been in it the whole time so is there Yvonne is there a psychological effect to not being able to feel the wind on your face you know the Sun on your face they're they're very much is there's something called sensory deprivation and your sensory system starts to kind of download over time and that affects you psychologically that can lead to depression anxiety or just a sense of detachment it can disrupt your sleep and it can start to affect your health and so that's why it's very important for us to have things within the station within our environment that can kind of bring that back and there it can be anything from the the fabrics and in the uniform or the clothes that you're wearing to the kinds of food that you're eating texture it's really important to entertainment diversion humor interaction touch feeling all of these things are so important and the habitats clearly the place where we're actually going to live is is key to much of this so nASA has and partners have launched the 3d printed habitat challenge design competition to create the optimum Martian housing we can see some different versions I think yeah here we have some of the some of these images Michelle how does 3d printing help you talked a little bit about how it helps us fix things well I mean you can create something while you're there how does that work with this you would just have a bunch of these 3d printers they're a couple guys on my team went and watched the this competition and they said it was really pretty pretty amazing meaning I think one of the winning teams used a slurry a mixture of materials they have these industrial sized 3d printers now I think the theirs they're starting to use them in construction with concrete the challenges of course with the nozzles clogging up things like that but yes so 3d printing is not just for making habitats for making tools we've actually practiced since some of some of the analog missions we've 3d printed tools on demand instead of having to take a whole big gigantic toolbox right you may be you could just print just very yeah okay so the idea here is that you'd live in one of these things Ellen what about the idea of living in a lava tube underground could we do that it would certainly give you that radiation protection you need at least a meter so at least three if feet if not six feet of rock to protect you really from that radiation so ultimately if we want to stay on Mars for a long time we've got to get out of the way of that radiation and so a lava tube would be a way to do it now obviously that presents challenges because now you're back an artificial light environment you're not in a real light environment that has psychological effects and so it's but it's a really good option in terms of human protection and it's already there so you don't have to worry about about creating that radiation protection so we know the lava tubes are there it means are we planning on landing near any of them those have been looked at as possible future landing sites okay okay point there's another reason to be interested in lava tubes and it ties back to the same thing which is the radiation protection if there was life on Mars it would also need protection from radiation and so lava tubes are really good place to look for signs of past or even possibly present life because it would be protected there and also there's other reasons as well it's more stable in the temperature it's a place where you know water and various forms might be found so it would be a really good place to start looking I didn't want to bring up one thing in a Vaughn can can amplify this much better since I'm a geologist not a doctor um but you know the reason radiation is bad for you is that it breaks your DNA and those breaks lead to things like cancer so it happens that some of us are actually better at repairing our DNA than others your DNA is always repairing itself at some point those repair mechanisms break down so this is a really critical area of research again space benefiting life here on earth the more we understand how to repair radiation damage so that maybe we can learn to live with radiation I think helps us live on Mars but it also helps us live on earth and that brings up the subject not only of radiation damage but of germs in general what are we going to do first of all to combat any viruses germs you tell me what can what can attack and at what point do we have to worry about contaminating the environment in some way I do have one piece of good news on that which is that if you send a crew of say six people they are very quickly going to share all of the germs that they are going to see for a long time so we found that our crews is after maybe an initial period they just didn't really get sick because they built up an immunity than everybody else's germs the problem is then when they came out and then interact with the rest of the population again they all got sick oh well okay well we're not coming back for a while so we'll see but we are coming back we are coming back Yvonne but what about general health issues while we're living there general health issues will you touched on one thing that's important our galactic responsibility we want to make sure that we don't contaminate a planet that we're trying to learn more about and lighting and UV can help with that but it doesn't do a whole lot to protect us so we're going to be exposed to micros between each other maybe microbes that we don't even know the microbiome of other possibly alien life-forms but also we're going to evolve and change to our immune systems will be stressed because of radiation the flight lack of sleep other medical issues that are going on but also we're going to change our own microbiome and we may not be as tolerant of ourselves as when we left the planet so all of these things are very important to us to think about what happens to the genetic code if we become too restrictive now we could put ourselves in a bubble and make things very protected from us in both directions but what does that do to our resiliency and we found over time that one of the reasons we've been able to persist as a human species is this intermingling of the environment and micro biomes so maybe we do want to interact and maybe that's part of the code of human survivability somewhere else what are we eating by the way please tell me it's not potatoes now we get to open it up a little bit you know something one of the reasons I love that movie is before it came out people were very skeptical about the food research we do it i sees they've told us give your astronauts a protein pill they'll be fine and now all I have to say is remember when you ran out of ketchup but yes so one of the joys of being on a planetary surface even with less gravity than the earth is there's enough gravity and enough a little bit more space so you're gonna be able to cook and there's a lot of good reasons to do that one is that bulk stored ingredients are much easier to keep shelf stable and highly nutritious for these long durations so you know a bag of flour is going to last a lot longer than a sealed in piece of bread another is that there's less packaging and when you're going to Mars masses everything so we're gonna be making our own bread is what you're telling is what I'm telling you yeah and then the other part is this combinatorics so you know if you if you've got a lasagna pre-prepared lasagna it's always gonna be a lasagna but if you give someone noodles and tomato powder and herbs and spices and cheese powder they can combine these things in a bunch of different ways so you get a much larger range of possible meals I know in the habitat will that be earth gravity or will that be moon Mars gravity Mars gravity yeah that's not really okay in the current Mars gravity's what a third a third earth so you can cook okay in a third gravity some things are gonna work differently but yeah you know okay you still wouldn't want an open flame that would be a terrible thing but but back to 3d printers 3d print food 3d print me neat 3d print the pizza some of these things already we're even finding ways to 3d print body parts like nose and ears injury off planet is a whole different situation but it can add to the whole stress and quality of your experience when you're sick or injured so we need to find ways to accelerate and amplify our our own rejuvenation and really leverage the body's capacity to heal itself but I think 3d printing is wonderful maiden spaces our 3d printer up there right now and not only have they demonstrated how we can 3d print and how we can exchange CAD drawings with people here on earth but there was an incident not too long ago a couple of years ago or so where we needed a special tool and they were able it would have meant flying a whole nother vehicle to deliver the tool and we were able to do the CAD drawing 3d printed successfully and voila you have it so I think that's a great way to give Christmas presents ability holiday presents or any kind of present for any celebration back on earth is to have something that we design on space and you kind of get a CAD design space version of some sort of 3d printed gift so we're celebrating holidays definitely every holiday okay we're celebrating holidays we're eating we're gonna be having food I bet we're growing our own food okay can we have babies let's see what we've been able to determine so far from what we've seen is that physiologically the reproductive system seems to be somewhat protected from the presence or absence of gravity so physiologically you're physiologically ambivalent to the gravity in your environment things still function fortunately for our heart our lungs and other body processes on the other hand we've actually conducted a seminar on Pediatrics in space so we are anticipating pioneering in space to the point where we have a community with children and what that might look like there's a gap in between we haven't quite resolved yet but again we're very much committed to demonstrating proof of concept okay [Laughter] the phrase that only NASA generations of fruit flies I wasn't talking about I'm sorry okay I'll hold it no no okay a couple more specifics a Martian day is a little bit longer than an Earth Day how many hours is a Martian doing about 39 minutes longer 39 minutes longer and what do we call a Martian day a soul okay how many how many souls or how many souls in an earth year or how many how many earth days in a Martian year I guess it's the one twice as long the marsh voice is long and we have seasons seasons and we have a day/night cycle day/night cycle okay this is like home do we have snow frost frost no it doesn't snow and frost doesn't know but we have frost and we have wind storms you've talked about that but but the wind storms are not Martian movie wind storms the atmosphere on Mars is very thin and it's not gonna knock anything over even in a huge windstorm so you do have dust storms and you do have wind but again the atmospheric density is so low that rain no no rain so nothing is coming down through that it's all somehow coming up okay condense it down in the atmosphere it's difficult what you're describing is a difficult situation we're not we're not going to land and then go running around and send postcards home and isn't this wonderful this is a real commitment make the case for me why should somebody want to do this I'm from Alaska so it's not all bad it was second ISM some people in the desert Southwest when they look at photos of Mars that looks like home to them so it was described as sort of like the desert Southwest so when you you know for you live in New York City so you look at pictures of Mars and that doesn't look very inviting no but I the pictures promoting this there was a whole city was a good restaurant scene you ready you know my answer is scientific we're gonna we're pretty sure the conditions on early Mars were not that different than the conditions on early Earth when life evolved and to me the real myth is for humans is to be have a lot of geologists and astrobiologists up there cracking open rocks not only finding out that life did evolve on Mars but finding the extent to which it became complex finding the extent to which it's different than life on Earth and that just doesn't take one rock sample it takes hundreds and hundreds of fossils to allow you to really understand that that takes humans that takes at least a scientific base on the surface and what oh go ahead Kim can I add to that cuz that absolutely is the main scientific motivation and for me but there's also a bit of a I want us to make earth our home your home you only start talking about your home when you leave it and you return to it so you don't when you're a kid your town is just town you only talk about it is your hometown when you leave it and come back and so I would like humanity to be able to leave Earth live somewhere else for a little while and then come back to their home planet and I hope that perspective would help us treat it the way it ought to be treated before we get further into why Mars Michele how do we get back we need to just make the case that we're coming back here how do we do that that is the to me that's the most exciting part so the the asset vehicle the thing that's gonna get us back off of Mars so that we can come back home to me that's the crown jewel of the whole engineering feat and that's something we haven't we haven't done all of the missions we've sent to Mars to date have all been one-way missions so developing an asset vehicle we hope to be able to pattern after the asset vehicle that we'll be building for the moon ideally same cabin maybe a little bit different propulsion system there's more gravity on Mars there's a little bit of an atmosphere so we need a little bit more boost to get off of the planet then we belong the moon but we're hoping there's a lot of synergy in those technologies so we are coming back okay with that in mind before we finish up before we go further here can we have the lights up a little I'd like to ask a question how many of you in this audience and one see by hands would like to take a trip to Mars and come back that's a fair number of hands okay how many of you would be willing to go to Mars and stay there and live for a couple of years oh I see hands I see hands okay fascinating so then you would go and not come back okay good question and may I introduce our doctor we could dim the lights again if you will Avon is on the record as saying she wants to go and live there why well we call it pioneering and it's because well first of all first and foremost it's the only way to know is to go and so exploration has always been a part of the human spirit and it's the curiosity the passion the discovery that are our tools are true vehicles to get us there and the only way to know yourself is to go in search of yourself so until we really go and push the envelope we don't know the full envelope capability capacity of the human envelope and to me that's just something that has to be not just known but the journey to get there is really the reward whether we find out the complete answer at the destination are you speaking of the journey of you Yvonne Cagle as an individual or the journey of all of us as Carl an answer to Carl Sagan's words you know I aspire to go off planet to pioneer Mars and I can only hope that not only should I have the privilege to go but when I get there that Karl will be there that you will be there and that all of you will be there too so you're doing it in part for everybody and with everybody it's interesting the word that is used for putting these habitats bringing people to Mars doing all this is terraforming what is terraforming mean and what's it about so terraforming is there have been scientific papers written about it as well as many many science fiction books it is could we take Mars and actually turn it into an earth-like environment so basically could we cause the atmosphere to become more dense more oxygen-rich so that you could walk around on the surface we could go grow crops out on the surface without having to live in a pressurized habitat so there again scientific papers that have been written on it that say it's it's feasible the problem is the mechanisms that have been discussed take hundreds of millions of years and then of course you have to maintain that atmosphere again Mars lacks a magnetic field without a magnetic field the solar wind is constantly stripping the upper layers the atmosphere away so the more you were building an atmosphere on Mars the more the solar winds starting to strip it away so it's a I think it's pretty tough I I tend to keep it in the science fiction category myself everybody has 3d glasses we're now going to look at some extraordinary images that nASA has 3d eyes to give us a better idea of what it's going to look like you've heard everyone talking about in sort of Arizona or the Southwest let's take a look and and our panel is going to try to explain what we're looking at if not where what we see from this all right this is a one of the Kasbah on Mars it's a it's a beautiful chasm that you can see from all those layered deposits in the interior it's been used by water at some point so that's a partially water carved channel on the surface those holes you see all over the place are impact craters and the fact if you look on the right side of the image you'll see there were very few impact craters on that high plateau on the left side of the image there are lots of craters the longer a surface is exposed the more craters it collects so I can tell you right away those are two different geologic units one is much younger than the other and we don't Ellen have any idea what the scale of this is is that right no we don't unfortunately my guess is it's probably it's that chasm that chasm is probably a couple kilometers across is my guess but I'm not quite sure where this is I'd also just like to point out that the depth on this has been exaggerated you know it's it looks much deeper than it it would be in real life okay next picture this is a great obviously perspective view or way they've been draping an image over topographic information of the surface to give you this multi Canyon view of these beautiful Hills on Mars again vertically exaggerated but not not quite as much as the previous image really beautiful sculpted terrain on Mars Mars has been heavily eroded by water and also the rocks are worn by the wind and covered in dust and I just think this is a gorgeous image it is gorgeous whoa that one's freaking my eyes these look like little volcanic Peaks almost I'm not sure where this is actually but really a beautiful image and some actual sand dunes down in the valley there on the right side of the image that's our little Sojourner Rover this is one of the landing sites from Pathfinder those are solar panels on top of that little rover and you can see it's gonna go make fries yeah that rock how big is so dramatic how big is Sojourner Sojourner is about this bout of less than a foot tall a foot long tiny we've got one in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC Oh course of that this is an impact crater it looks like with sand dunes on the base of it y'all let that loose material inside has been blown into all those ripples which are sand dunes looks like water doesn't this is another impact greater impact from an asteroid probably uh yeah and these are beautiful beautiful sand dunes we talked about dust storms earlier a lot of dust on Mars blown around by the wind forms into beautiful dunes that are again pretty analogous to dunes that that we see here on earth I love this image this is the inside the wall of an impact crater but if you look along the rim of it you can see where there's almost been landslides of material those kind of smooth triangular deposits that head down towards the floor of the crater oh so this is probably a skylight into a lava tube what do you think so it's a little hard to tell without the context but we see lava tubes on earth volcanoes such as in Hawaii and we see what we're pretty sure lava tubes on Mars so they're really really long caves and then every once in a while the ceiling falls in so if you can see the hole on the left the ceiling is falling in you can kind of just see the tube continuing off towards the top of the image and again there's that material that's gathered been blown in there on the inside this is almost certainly a skylight I'd say yeah it makes you want to go and put a habitat in there it certainly does this is Curiosity rover and Gale Crater background and Gale Crater has been an amazing place for curiosity to explore what we found out over the years is that from all the rocks that curiosity has studied is that in the past again about three and a half billion 3.8 billion years ago this place was potentially habitable so we don't know that it was inhabited but the conditions were there that would have been conducive to the formation of life and those are the 3d images extraordinary you don't need your glasses anywhere so as Ellen was saying earlier we know a lot and we know a lot before we get there and we're gonna know a lot more after we get there and when we come back which some of us are doing except for Yvonne we'll be telling you all about it just quick final thoughts when's this gonna happen when do you think we'll be there anybody says we have to we'll sorry I said as soon as we have the will to get this we have the will okay I'll accept that and what happens after Mars do we go to other planets or isn't as Mars occupy us for a very long time we not only go to other planets we go to asteroids we go to other galaxies ultimately as we learn how to do this better but yeah we just keep going we just say go then and with that I want to say thank you to the panel and let me let me just mention the first science fiction movie I ever saw we're talking about this earlier was a movie called destination moon it's a pretty awful black and white really tacky movie but but I was a little very little kid and I was astounded and here's the part that really astounded me at the very end of this dumb plot nonetheless it was it was a rocket and it was going to the moon at the very end there was a crawl curls when the words come up on the screen and at the very end of the movie it said this is the end dot-dot-dot of the beginning and I thought oh my goodness we're really going to do this so I'm now here to say we're really going to do this thank you all very much thank you very much you you [Music]

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 56,224

Keywords: We Will Be Martians, The Martian, Mars, Humans going to Mars, Win a trip to Mars, First humans to go to Mars, What would it take to go to Mars?, Journey to Mars, Kim Binsted, Yvonne Cagle, Ellen Stofan, Michelle Rucker, Lynn Sherr, Matt Damon, moon landing, sending humans to Mars, Space, space travel, survive on Mars, World, Science, festival, NYC, New York City, 2020

Id: oCrnA4bYCag

Length: 85min 38sec (5138 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 29 2020