Main Engine Cut Off - T+104: Jake Robins

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

Jake Robins of WeMartians joins me to talk InSight, Mars EDL, and Mars 2020. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, and six anonymous—and 203 other supporters on Patreon. Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter WeMartians Podcast 51 - Entry, Descent, and Landing - WeMartians Podcast 47 - Recovering Opportunity (feat. Mike Seibert) - WeMartians Podcast 52 - Comin' up Jezero (feat. Tim Goudge) - WeMartians Podcast Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo and I've got an old friend with us, Mr. Jake from Wee Martians. How you going? How's it going? Hey, man. How you doing? It's like we never talk on podcasts. Yeah, I don't remember the sound of your voice. I don't... It's been a while. It's been a month. There's been a ton of Mars stuff happening

in the last couple of weeks, so I figured this was a good time to have you back on to break it down, talk a little bit about what's going on with two different missions, and maybe go on a rant if you see fit in one particular case. So maybe we can start with insights. So we've got a new spacecraft on Mars. You are probably pumped.

This probably made the end of your year, I would assume. Yeah, this really capped what was a pretty busy Mars year. Like I think back on this year, we're getting close to the end of it here. And I'm like pretty tired. Like there was a lot, there was a lot going on. Um, you know, between the, the launch and the landing kind of bookending the year and then all of the Mars 2020 and opportunity stuff in the middle, this was a, this is a good way to kind of tie it up for sure. And it's at least not also crazy now that the new spacecraft is down. Cause it's going to be a while until we really start getting insight stuff uh like frequently you know it seems

like they have a much longer deployment phase than most missions is that uh something that that you've been thinking about at all yeah well i mean they so there's there's sort of two things to consider with that one of them is that we've never put instruments on the ground directly with spacecraft. So this is kind of breaking new ground in that there's an arm. It's lifting these instruments off the deck of the lander and putting them right on the surface of the planet. And so that's a new thing. We've never done that. And just kind of walking through those operations and finding a good spot for those is one consideration that probably stretches out the the commissioning phase of the

spacecraft and then the other one is just this this heat flow probe this the second instrument uh aside from the seismometer it's just like super weird it's gonna burrow into the ground and it's got this little spring thing that just kind of slowly tap tap tap five meters down so it just takes a while it's just sort of a. Yeah. It's kind of amazing that there hasn't been more talk about that until the day that the spacecraft was landing. I feel like people did not realize that we were sticking something that far into Mars. It felt like it flew under the radar until all of a sudden people were like, holy crap, that's like 16 feet down there. Yeah. And there was all this bad coverage of conflating it with a drill. And it's not a

drill, right? It's like a little mole, a little kind of just like this. Imagine this kind of footlong spike that just kind of pulls a string with heat sensors behind it. So it's pretty interesting, and like I say, it's pretty unique. I can't think of another instrument like this on any other spacecraft. And so breaking all this new ground just takes some time. We're obviously going to learn a ton about Mars from InSight itself, and there's going to be a lot of research coming out of what InSight finds. But I feel like something you always talk about

is how new missions change what you learn from old missions. And I assume that's going to be the case here for InSight as well, maybe even to a bigger degree than we have before, where we're going to get all this data about the inside of Mars and be able to put that up against what we learned from other missions. Is there anything like that that you're hoping has that kind of synergy in your wildest dreams? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think you're pretty bang on with that. What's pretty special about InSight is that it will get global level data, right? And so these seismic readings and these heat transfer readings will be able to let scientists model out what Mars looks like kind of layer by layer all the way to the middle. And that data will literally provide context to every other

surface measurement we have for Curiosity, Opportunity, and Spirit, Pathfinder, like everything we've ever had. And then we can also use that for all the orbital data. So this could be like, from a scientific perspective, just the glue that can bind a lot of different data sets together. And that makes it super exciting. So it's almost like an exponential science return in that regard. And I know we are in this weird spot where we don't have too many surface missions planned from here on out the next couple of years,

past Mars 2020. There's kind of this drop-off on the NASA missions. I wonder if that's maybe fortuitous timing where we're going to get new stuff from Insight. We're maybe going to open up new things that we need to go investigate. And that once we finally get another mission on the books, we might actually be able to target something a little better. I'm trying to turn the emptying Mars backlog into a good thing here. But maybe that's I don't know, maybe that doesn't work that way.

Yeah, I don't think I buy that. I was like, hey, maybe this could work out. I mean, yes, like you're going to be able to now use InSight for a lot of context to decide the next lander. But there's sort of a, like a sequence to that where you can just use whatever orbiter or, you know, whatever spacecraft is X amount of years back to inform your next one. So as long as you have that kind of flow in there, you're always good. Just because you don't have the newest spacecraft data doesn't mean you can't think of the next question you want to ask, right? And so the gap is still a gap. I still don't like it. Okay, cool. You're still nervous about it.

Yeah, yeah. All right. So it's going to be a while. Maybe we'll have you back when Insight starts doing its thing and is fully deployed next year or something like that. But let's talk a little bit about the rant that you've been on recently, the thing that's been ticking you off about Mars EDL. And you had this whole great podcast about Insight where you focused a lot on how it actually got from the top of the atmosphere down to the surface. And some of the misreporting, maybe you would use the word, or I don't know, spin. I don't know how to describe the problems with the numbers that you're ranting about recently.

But what's going on? Why are you so mad about this? I don't know if I'm mad. It's just a little disingenuous, maybe. I mean, so NASA has to set expectations. And so, you know, they're thinking about the last time any people tried to land something on Mars was two years ago, and it didn't go so well for Europe's Schiaparelli, you know, demonstrator. And so NASA's had a failure on its own in the past. So you don't want to put yourself in a place where you brag and then fail. Right.

And so they have to be super conservative with that. So I don't mind them kind of stressing that EDL is crazy and a lot of things can go wrong. But, you know, what really got me thinking about this was was kind of leading up to the landing a couple of days before was a lot of messaging around half of all Mars missions fail. You know, kind of characterizing it is like this is really a coin flip. We never know what's going to happen. This is we're just handing our spacecraft to the gods to determine what may or may not be. And that's that's where it's a little bit kind of not true.

or may not be. And that's where it's a little bit kind of not true. And so they show these statistics, like here are 30 Mars missions and, you know, 13 of them worked or whatever. And if you really dig into that, it's not the whole story, right? And so the two things that I really kind of noticed was that missions in the past were worse off than missions in the future. So you can't compare the success, you know, probability of insight, which is a modern spacecraft that with all this kind of new computer and technology to, you know, whatever kind of duct tape spacecraft the Soviets were sending back in the early seventies, right? Like these, these things that the, the, uh,

the landing, you know, paradigm was really like kind of hit the surface and throw this like random styrofoam ball to roll over. And it was not a good system. They didn't work very well. So comparing those statistics across like 50 years, you could do the same thing with rockets, right? If you added up all rockets through history and said, OK, well, the success rate of rockets is this. And then try and like project that onto, you know, an Atlas V probability success. It doesn't make sense. Yeah, totally missing the wrong, you're missing all context and coming up with

completely inaccurate conclusions, just because it sounds kind of cool to say, which is- Exactly, yeah. And maybe ULA will start doing that. I don't know, they'll say, hey, rockets fail half the time. All rockets fail, but ours never. started doing that, I don't know, they'll say rockets fail half the time. All rockets fail, but ours never. And then the other thing I noticed was that NASA in particular is actually very good at this. So if you compare NASA to the Europeans or the Russians and Soviets before them, NASA really, really tips the scales. All of that success that you see in whatever stats you hear about 50 percent, that's almost all nasa uh they've only really had in terms of landers they've had one failure um and so that's basically puts them eight for nine

which is a lot different than less than 50 right so that's kind of the thing that i explored and i was hearing those stats everywhere and i really wanted to kind of like understand it. And so in, in researching that, I kind of, I think I figured out a real basic ideas in terms of why NASA is so good at it. And it kind of has to do with just picking a, you know, investing in a good design upfront and then just being really, really conservative and consistent with it, you know, just picking what works and, and, and not deviating too far from it. Yeah. And that's something that in years past where we were talking a lot about SpaceX's plan for Mars and how different their landing path was than what NASA has done. I feel like we talked about that where NASA has this same

architecture every time with varying sizes and varying final descent technologies. sizes and varying final descent technologies. But really, the basics are the same thing from, you know, 40 years ago to now. And that's why they've gotten so good at it. And this is something you explore a lot in your podcast. So I don't want you to rehash that whole thing now. But one thing I'm interested in thinking about is, what is NASA's path forward and everyone else, maybe not just NASA, but what is everyone else's path forward for larger payloads in the future? How could you see this going? Because we're kind of at the maximum size of what we can do, given the rockets that we have today, given the technology we have developed today. Curiosity, I think, was on the upper end of what we could land on Mars with that same technology stack. So where do you think we go from here in the next 10, 20,

30 years of landing things on Mars? Yeah, that's a great question. And you called it out. So Curiosity, if you think about the landing architecture that NASA uses today, which is basically this capsule design and then a heat shield and a parachute and some sort of landing thruster, that sort of system has been super successful for them. But it's ranged from the smallest. Insight is kind of on the smaller end. It's like this two and a half meter diameter capsule. Viking was sort of the first one, which is like three and a half.

And then Curiosity is at the upper end, which is four and a half. And Curiosity had to really, really push the envelope to work. It needed its own brand new heat shield design. The parachute was pretty cutting edge. And then just the whole sky crane maneuver, which is the only way they could really kind of figure out how to get that big mass down there. So that's sort of, you know, we're peaking. This design is kind of maxed out, is kind of the way to think about it. And you face a lot of problems when you try and scale it up. One of the issues was just the drag coefficient. So as your diameter increases on this capsule, your mass is going to go up at one degree higher, right?

So you're going to have two degrees of diameter increase, but three degrees of mass increase. And so you have to get bigger exponentially faster than your mass. And so if you want to go to, you know, like some sort of, uh, uh, mass, uh, you know, scenario where you could put, um, you know, human architectures in the ground, think of a human size, size habitats or, or vehicles or, or, you know, ascent vehicles, and you're getting into this 40 to a hundred ton range, your, your heat shield would have to be like 30 meters wide or some, some crazy number. Right. So I read a few papers on it. As big as the new like telescope radio telescope that we're

putting here on earth to land on Mars. Yeah. And so, you know, that's why, that's why you keep hearing all these like random ideas of these like inflatable heat shields or supersonic retro propulsion. These are all new technologies that are trying to get around this sort of size cap these random ideas of these inflatable heat shields or supersonic retro propulsion, these are all new technologies that are trying to get around this sort of size cap that the current amazing, but size-limited design is stuck with. So it makes me think that,

I feel like SpaceX's pitch to NASA should be, do you want to learn how to land really big stuff on Mars and less do you want to learn how to land really big stuff on Mars and less do you want to add a settlement to Mars? I feel like they're pitching the wrong technology here, if you ask me. Yeah, maybe that's one of those things where SpaceX will get there. They often do that, where they come up with this amazing humanitarian ideal goal, and then they kind of reel it into a practical application. And so, you know, sending 100 people to Mars, NASA is probably just not really interested in that right now. But you're totally right.

If you could reframe that and that, hey, NASA, we figured out a way how to put a 20-ton payload on the surface. Now you can think about that, right? And then NASA could go, OK, now we can really scale up from our three-ton curiosity to something one order of magnitude higher. Yeah, and I feel like there would be no shortage of things to fly on that. And at the same time, you're developing somebody learning

how to land that big of something on Mars, which eventually leads to landing humans on Mars. So it feels like given where we're at in the timeline of landing on Mars, given where SpaceX is headed, I feel like if I had to predict the future, that would be my best bet is, you know, we're seeing NASA start to develop some commercial landers for lunar payloads. They're on the small size now. They're going to be heading up to the bigger size in a couple of years. If that ain't the same path we take with Mars, I'll be pretty bummed. Yeah, yeah. And maybe Mars is just so different because of that atmosphere.

I mean, on the moon, scaling is just kind of a matter of how big your fuel tanks are. The Martian atmosphere must add that different dynamic where it's not just size you have to figure out. You need to find the clever way to do it. And NASA could figure that out. I'm sure if they had the resources, they'd put their heads to it, they could do it. But maybe the commercial market is the better way to approach that. I don't really know the answer to that one, but it's an interesting conundrum. And a conundrum that we will debate for years or decades, probably, at this point. Decades, yeah.

All right, let's switch it up a little bit here. Actually, one last thing on Insight. It has a little weather station on it, which I saw some reporting and I think I heard you talking about it on one show where it has already detected a little dust devil heading across itself there. Yeah. So it does have a weather station and one of the instruments on that weather station is basically a barometer and so it has like a pressure inlet and uh they did this really cool press release jpl did with with some audio that was built around the the pressure measurements so it's not a true microphone but like it's pretty close because a microphone just measures pressure anyway um and so they yeah they, this, this pressure drop and you can hear it, which is cool, but that's basically very consistent

with what a dust devil does. So when you have these kinds of little, you know, wind events, they, they do create this kind of low pressure zone around them. And you can, uh, you can measure that. And so curiosity is measured those kinds of things on its own weather station as well. And it's, uh, it's pretty cool. So is that a good sign for opportunity? Well, we already know that. I mean, so Insight is... Yellowfin in the room if you're mentioning dust devils on Mars right now. Insight's very close to Curiosity.

And we know Curiosity is already getting quite a bit of wind right now. We haven't seen that same level of um active wind weather you know the thousands of kilometers to the west that that opportunity is but it's only a matter of time like we've just kind of entered the the windiest part of the year um because it's the summer and so there's lots of heat energy hitting there so and actually the opportunity is in a pretty um you know atypically windy spot it's on the slope of this crater and the wind should be shooting up those slopes. So I, I it's in its best spot. So like, I'm, I'm really watching the next four or five weeks for, for opportunity. I think that's kind of the sweet spot. If we don't hear something by then, then, uh, I'm going to start to have sad

feelings. Well, I think it's just good. It's a good, uh, not only is it a good sign, but I think it's also good for public relations kind of communications to have a registered dust devil on Mars because at the time, uh, where the listening campaign for opportunity was under fire, people like you and others were saying, Hey, if we wait until, you know, these months that we're in now, that's dust devil season. Uh, so to be able to say, look, we've already got one here, this is following what our predictions say, I feel like that's a good sign if not only for the goodwill that it

builds towards the Opportunity team being right, it does give us a little hope that we might hear something back pretty soon for the little rover out there. Yeah, well hopefully the Martian gods are listening to you when you say that all right uh before i get you out of here last little story here the mars 2020 rover uh landing

site was chosen this is something you were following pretty closely over the last what year two years that it's been uh talking about yeah a couple years now i think i've been following it so we've we've picked jezero crater. Is that correct? Yeah. I started doubting myself for a second because I remember a lot about the Delta and I was like, was it named Delta something? So what's up with this crater? Tell me, do you like it? Do you not like it? And what should we be excited about? Yeah, this was my favorite from the beginning, if I'm being totally honest. And so I don't want to take credit for predicting it, but I will take credit for predicting it.

So this is a pretty exceptional little um place on mars and uh i actually just had a conversation with um tim gouge who is uh basically the guy who's been leading the charge on the the advocacy of this of this place and is a pretty pretty known expert in this area um so he taught me a lot about it and now i'm even more jazzed than I was before. But basically, you have this crater and, you know, that's formed by some sort of impact event. And then what's special about it is that in two spots on the side of the crater, the walls have been breached by this inflow. And then it filled up like a lake and then it broke through another wall on the other side and spilled out and so you have

kind of all these scenarios for inflow you have scenarios for standing water and you have scenarios for outflow and the watershed that fed this crater lake is like massive like it just the the streams extend hundreds of kilometers and so you kind of have this this situation where all these different places on mars all these different rock types and mineral types and all these special, amazing places have all come to one spot and laid themselves into layers on this crater. And so it's kind of like a goldmine of, you know, just diversity of geology. And so that makes it very special. Standing water, of course indicates um a good place for habitability so if there's any kind of opportunities for you know was this a place where

life could have existed in mars past this this is a good spot for that um these samples will will be able to tell you so much because you'll be able to get kind of layers in the core it's just overall it's like just a super special place to do some geology. And NASA did well by picking it, I think. And it sounds like it's within range of other candidate sites for an extended mission, if that were to come about, that it's within the range of what Curiosity has already driven. Is that accurate? Yeah, it's pretty close. And we expect Mars 2020 to be able to go farther faster. close um and and we expect mars 2020 to be able to go farther faster and so there's a special place that they're calling midway which is kind of outside the crater so you have to drive kind of

up the delta leave the crater and kind of go a little bit to the south and uh what's neat about that is it's um this area because it's kind of right next to something called the the isidis basin which is this massive massive ancient impact crater um so much that it barely even looks like a crater or more it's just kind of ground that's lower um and so uh these rocks that that kind of were exposed by this by this impact are super super old there's some of the oldest rocks that we can see on the surface. So past that, a lot of the stuff we see is this 3.7 to 3.8 billion years. That's the sweet spot for most of the stuff you see on the surface. But these ones actually extend to the 4 billion year old mark. And so if you could do all your stuff in Jezero and have an extended mission that leaves the crater and goes to this, you could kind of get a two-in-one mission in terms of what types of terrain you can explore, which would be

great. I just don't know how they'll solve the sample bit because you don't want to place two sample caches. And so you have to kind of decide, do you do the samples in Jezero and leave them there and then not sample the other area? Or do do like half and half but then risk you know halfway to the other place your rover breaks down and you lose whatever you have there's there's a lot of different scenarios that you have to play out there so i'm not sure how they'd want to do that my guess is they're going to be conservative and do all the samples in jezero and leave them there um which would kind of be a bummer because of the cool rocks you find but it is what it is you can't have honestly of all of the sample return qualms i have uh where to put the samples on the surface isn't any of them because there's a lot of other problems that need to be solved before

that is that is the biggest issue to fry yeah we should find the mission yeah exactly having that figure out how to land the thing um the landing site discussion i was you know listening to all you talking about it and reading everything I could about it. And the question that kept coming up in my mind is why didn't we pick this one sooner? If it's such a wonderland of Mars geology, is it, is it the fact that it's a pretty tricky place to land? So our landing ellipse was not small enough, uh, in the past.

And now because of the new technology and new guidance software, we can actually make it there? Or were the other sites that there's already spacecraft, are those significantly better than Jezero? And this is kind of like the best one that we haven't been to yet. Yeah, it could be a little bit of both. I haven't seen any information about whether Curiosity could have landed here. Just based on my own kind of just making stuff up and what i kind of know that like the lips the ellipse for landing for curiosity was bigger which would kind of mean it would have to land a bit further away because 2020 can kind of nestle right up against the the bottom of the delta um and so maybe just combined with how slow curiosity is that it wasn't an acceptable traverse to start the mission

that's one possibility but i think that the biggest thing is that um i don't think that at the time that they were choosing landing sites for curiosity they had someone who would advocate for this place i don't think we knew enough about it by by that time like you know when did we pick the landing site when we pick you a crater it was 20 you know that process would have started in 2000 probably five oh yeah well the whole process and then probably wouldn't have heard it until what two years before launch right well yeah and remember that the planned launch was 09 right so if it was four years and yeah oh five say they would have started they didn't have Mars reconnaissance orbiter at that point. Right. So who would have submitted, who would have submitted, um, yeah, nobody would have submitted that if, if they didn't know as much about it as we do now. And so that's probably the biggest reason that, that that wouldn't have been submitted. Jake, I'm extraordinarily glad that I had you on here because that solved my biggest, uh, the thing that was bugging me that I couldn't find anyone to give me a straight answer on. So this has been therapeutic, to say the least.

I could give you the NASA answer as well and say that they're different missions and they had different objectives. Yeah, that sounds good. Jake, anyone out there that's listening that is like, I need more Mars in my life, where can they go to check out what you're working on? And maybe tell us a little bit about what you've got going on these days, what you're working on in the next little bit here. Uh, yeah. So website is we Martians.com. Um, you can find it in a podcast player. We Martians one word, and then I'm on Twitter

at we underscore Martians. So that's a, it's pretty easy to remember. Um, I am, uh, yeah, I'm just wrapping up the year. So I hope to have an episode out very soon. Maybe by the time you hear this. Oh, foreshadowing. Yeah, that'll be the deep dive into Jezero so you can learn all about the science from the expert himself. And then, yeah, as I look ahead to next year,

it's an off year, right? And so there's no Mars launches or landings next year. I really want to take the time to get ready for 2020, which is going to be insane. Um, hopefully, hopefully nothing gets pushed too far off of it. Yeah. But like if, if half the missions don't launch a 2020, it'll be twice as busy as this year. So, um, so I want to make sure that, uh, you know, I learned as much as I can and talk to some people and do some deep dives into, um, the Mars 2020 mission, the, uh, ESA's ExoMars rover. Um, I would love to try and get somebody to talk to me about

the Chinese mission or the, uh, the Emirate, United Arab Emirates, uh, mission. Uh, I don't know how successful I will be with that, but we'll see. And then, you know, just I really want to try and get some of the content that I love doing the most out next year, which are these kind of storytelling and educational and historical viewpoints

that I am fascinated with. I can just never find the time to do them. So that's my goal. We'll see how successful I am by the end of 2019. But it sounds like a good way to get ready for 2020 for all of us who aren't working on it day to day. So I'm excited. As a listener, I'm very excited.

So everybody out there should go check it out. And then also I'll plug Off Nominal since Jake and I do that show once a month. And I feel like I don't plug it enough. So this is a good chance to plug offnominal.space. Yeah, I don't plug it enough either. All right, Jake, thank you so much for coming on. And I'm sure we'll hear from you soon. Thanks for having me. I love being on here. Thanks again to Jake for coming on the show. And before I get out of here, I want to say a very

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keep it independent. And if you are a $3 a month or more supporter, you get access to Miko Headlines, where I do a show every weekend running through the stories of the week. It's a great way to stay up on space news. For now, though, that is it for this week. And I will talk to you soon. Thanks again for listening and thanks for support, and have a good week.