Main Engine Cut Off - T+184: Jake Robins on the 2021 Mars Fleet and Future Exploration

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

Our good friend Jake Robins, host of WeMartians and my cohost on Off-Nominal, joins me to talk about the arrival and early operations of the 2021 Mars fleet—Hope, Tianwen-1, and Perseverance. Then we dig into what the future of Martian exploration looks like, including strategy, communications, sample return, and the upcoming decadal survey.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 39 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, and seven anonymous—and 509 other supporters.TopicsWeMartians PodcastJake Robins | PatreonWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) / TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) / TwitterHome - Off-NominalEpisode 39 - Europe Saved Cassini’s Ass - Off-NominalWeMartians - Episode 95 - Big Rocket Roundup (feat. Anthony Colangelo)Hope Mars Mission on Twitter: “The Emirates Ultraviolet Spectrometer captured these images of Mars from an altitude of 36,000 km above the Martian surface. Each colour represents light collected at a different ultraviolet wavelength and provides information about the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere.”WeMartians - Episode 81 – A Probe Called Hope (feat. the Mars Hope team)WeMartians - Episode 92 - Hope Arrives at Mars (feat. Sarah Al Amiri)China's Tianwen-1 enters orbit around Mars - SpaceNewsWeMartians - Episode 94 - Guiding Perseverance to the Ground (feat. Swati Mohan)Mars 2020 Mastcam Z Sol 4 Horizon PanoramaReport calls for revamped cost-conscious vision for Mars exploration - SpaceNewsNASA Awards Mars Ascent Propulsion System Contract for Sample Return – NASA’s Mars Exploration ProgramNASA considering commercial Mars data relay satellites - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and we've got a good old friend with us today, Jake Robbins of Wee Martians and my co-host of Off Nominal is joining us to talk about Mars exploration in the current time and in the future. Talk about the arrival of the 2021 Mars fleet, as I've been calling it. UAA's Hope, Tianwen-1 from China, and Perseverance from NASA. We'll also talk a lot about the future of exploration. It's something that's been on my mind recently as I've seen all these missions go off. There's some questions lingering about what the next couple of transfer windows looks like for Mars exploration. It's something that's been on my mind recently, as I've seen all these missions go off. There's some questions lingering about what the next, you know, couple of transfer windows looks like for Mars exploration, some strategy about what goes into those decisions, maybe a little bit about the communications, you know, issue that comes up from time to time, this issue of

aging orbiters that are key communications assets and what to do about that. This is a fun one, because Jake and I are doing a little bit of a crossover here. So I've actually appeared over on We Martians, his podcast. We talked all about the big rockets and how they apply to some of the Mars beat that Jake follows. So if you have not checked out We Martians, it's a good opportunity to do so. I've got a link over in the show notes or wherever you're listening to this, search for We Martians in there and I will be in if you're listening to this the day it comes out the most recent episode of we Martians but he's got a ton of content that you definitely should check out and also as I said he's my co-host on off

nominal which is the other podcast that we do together more laid-back very fun we recently had Leo and right on the show so definitely check off nom.com out if you have not heard that show but before Jake gets on here before you give him a, I want to say thank you to all of you who makes this kind of thing possible. There are 548 of you out there supporting the show every single month. If you want to be the one that gets us to 550, well, then I think you'll need to find a friend and head over to mainenginecutoff.com support. This episode was produced by 39 executive producers. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian,

and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, Chris, and seven anonymous executive producers. That list is awful long. I'm very thankful for all of your support. If you want to help support the show, head over to managingcutoff.com slash support. Jump in there at $3 a month or more, and you get access to Miko Headlines every single week, which is an entire other podcast in your feeds where I run through every story of the week. It's really a great way to stay up on Space News and help support the show. So if you like what I do here, if you want more of it head over there and join at the club and with that long preamble let's give jake a call jake robbins welcome to managing cutoff for the fourth or fifth time i can't remember either yeah i think you are now the most uh most miko guested person

of all time i like like it. Congratulations. I'll take that title. Yeah, that's good. All right. I want to start by asking you a question because I often tell people about podcasting I do, and I say, I do this show, and I do this other one called Off Nominal with this guy, Jake Robbins, which to everyone out there, you should check out Off Nominal. We just had Leo Enright of Irish TV fame on, which was an amazing episode.

So definitely check that out. But when I tell people about this, and then I say, this other guy does like a Mars podcast, people are always like, what does that mean? Like, what is a Mars podcast? So can you give me an answer for these people in my life that are asking that question? Yeah, so I mean, I'm interested in planetary exploration and, you know, both by robots and by humans. And I guess I wanted to make the podcast a little bit different and have a bit of a niche. So I actually just picked one planet to really kind of center my focus on. So I, you know, I get to unpack all the different kinds of missions that go to Mars.

There's rovers, there's orbiters, there's landers. And then I sort of broaden that out a little bit. I touch a little bit on the moon and well, both surface and orbit on the moon, just because that's kind of where people are going to be flying next. And if deep space exploration with humans is my beat, then that's kind of where I get to spend some time. But mostly, it's just Mars. So we talk about science, you know, so results from the missions talking about the things we learn about the planet, the geology, the geochemistry, all those kinds of things. We talk about the spacecraft. So the cool technology behind, you know, landing these rovers or flying these missions. We talk about the policy a little bit.

And we also talk about humans like I talk about. So it's kind of a good broad range. But keeping focused allows me to go pretty deep on some of these things, which is really fun. And that's kind of a good broad range um but keeping focused allows me to go pretty deep on some of these things which is really fun and that's kind of why i like it you you're like secretly or not so secretly a geology nerd who also likes space a lot because some of your geology episodes are like wow i never have thought about rocks in this way in my life it's it's like a view into a different world for me personally as people probably know from like the content I cover here.

I don't cover a lot of planetary exploration, like day-to-day news. So I appreciate your insight on all that stuff. So WeMartians.com, if someone has not checked out or wherever you're listening to this, just search WeMartians in there. All right. I've brought you here because you are now able to catch your breath after what has been a crazy couple of months for you. The Mars fleet has arrived to some extent. There's one arrival left in terms of Chang'an down to the surface. I would love a little bit of like a recap on how the arrivals went, what some of the early operations are like.

So do you want to do this in arrival order? Sure, yeah. So is that mars hope from the uae first it is mars hope yeah by a hair uh less than 24 hours before tianwen won um i mean overall honestly the whole thing has gone really smoothly we had you know two newcomers to mars three spacecraft uh mars is notoriously dangerous for newcomers you know their first missions don't often go very well. So, uh, considering all that, it all went really, really well. All three of these missions arrived and did

everything they needed to do pretty safely and, uh, you know, without issue. So that's kind of great to see, uh, Mars hope. So that's the, um, uh, it's a small, well, not that small, but, uh, kind of a, a simple orbiter, um, by the United Arab Emirates. It's their very first space mission into deep space, their very first one to Mars to mars um a really fascinating story of development with this because the whole space agency is brand new this is like literally like their first official project so it's quite a ambitious one to chew off um and they uh did everything kind of right and on time and launched and they made it there and just in time for their the country's 50th anniversary so it's a really nice story there are some really fascinating people that kind of came up with

this project and are now kind of superstars so that's kind of fun to watch uh so it is now in an orbit around mars kind of their insertion parking orbit they're doing some maneuvers this month to kind of get down to their science orbit but they're kind of good to go so that's kind of great to see i saw some photos started to be released as well i i didn't look in enough to your tweets from the last like day or two or whatever it was that had these images can you tell me about those at all it looked like some sort of multi-colored yeah it was a little trippy looking to be honest it's their first yeah it was a bit trippy it's their first science release um so i'm putting science kind of in quotations there but um it

is very limited but uh so they have three instruments on board. There's kind of like a regular visual camera. Then they have one sort of in the infrared spectrum and one in the ultraviolet spectrum. And so they sort of just took pictures of Mars with all three instruments and released that as a, as a, you know, a PDF. So that's kind of cool to see. That means all the instruments are working. That's the, the, the news that I really took from that is everything's functional, which

is great. They'll get a lot more into the pipeline once they get to their science orbit and get their their software up and running so that the stuff's just flowing to us more regularly but it's awesome to see one thing before we move on that i i heard you say somewhere else about the the orbit that it will settle into eventually has this pretty cool like orbital resonance to it and it can image the entire planet i would love to hear some more about that from you yeah so the orbital period on the science orbit for hope is two and one quarter sols if you will right and so basically every two and a quarter days it comes back to the close approach which means that mars

is turned one quarter turn so that's that that extra quarter which means that four orbits gives you all four quadrants of the planet you get the total view all together so that's kind of an awesome way for them to really you know programmatically catalog the what the planet looks like over time and then because there's a low point and a high point the the low point they get you know they go faster they get closer they get these kind of high res surface shots and then the high point they're able to do full globe images and so they can kind of get the good you know good range of different ways to look at the planet so it enables them to do a lot of really interesting science it's focused around the atmosphere that's kind of what the uh the the orbiter is is optimized to do so they're going to be tracking weather and atmospheric loss of oxygen

and hydrogen and different things there. So it's going to be fun. I can't wait for the science to start coming out with it. And one final bit on this mission. You have had some interviews with people that run the space agency. And also you have now gone

two heads of the space agency in the last calendar year in terms of interview rank. And you also had some science, was it science and engineering team members on before it launched? I'm going to post those links in the show notes as well. But how was the vibe from the team both before and after talking to these people that are actually working on, you know, hey, we're going to start a space agency. Cool. Let's send a Mars orbiter out there.

What was that like to kind of get like a pre and post arrival uh you know snapshot of their brains it was awesome so like this is what i kind of mean when i talk about the the good story the good feel good story that comes out of this mission because um they built everything from the ground up and so you know if think about any of those stories where where people invent something from nothing and it's always like a it's a it's a rush and it's it's death defying and it's like really really scary to do those kind of things lots of risk um these are the people that did that a lot of them you know came from different uh industries because there was no space industry before this and so they're learning everything as they go um it's a very young team it's a very diverse team and they are a very diverse team. And they are just,

you can just feel the excitement and the love dripping from their voices. Sometimes we get a little jaded with these, you know, watching an old NASA press conference with a bunch of old guard who have just been through this over and over. And there's just like, there's not much left in them, you know? And they're like, landing on Mars is really hard. It's like, you personally have done it like six times. Yeah, it's not that exciting for you anymore, I guess. But this is not the case with the UAE. They're just like, they can't believe what they're doing. They've worked so hard and they're just super, super relieved.

So I got to talk to three members of the team from propulsion, from a science team and from some guidance navigation stuff right after they launched. And so they kind of had that post launch euphoria that was really, really nice to see. And then I spoke with Sarah Alamiri, who is the president of the UAE Space Agency, just last month, two days after they had arrived. And so she was still beaming with joy. And it was just it was awesome. It was so inspiring to talk to them and feel that enthusiasm. All right. One group of team members that you will never talk to. Let's move on to China's mission here. What's going on at this point with Tianwen? Yeah. So Tianwen-1 is also kind of figuring out its orbit. So it went into this

very elliptical orbit to start with. So it was very close on one side and went all the way out to like 180,000 kilometers on the other side. And they had to do that because they had to do a plane change. So they arrived in sort of like an equatorial orbit and they had to go polar so they can start doing reconnaissance on their landing sites. And so they went way out there, did a plane change, and then they came way back and they started lowering it. So they're now in what they're calling their reconnaissance orbit, which is where they are taking pictures of their landing site for the rover, which is still just attached to the orbiter at this point. And, you know, it's along for the ride still in space. They're going to spend probably two months gathering all the data they need for that landing site and figuring out how they want to approach it.

And, you know, all those kinds of things before they deploy the rover in a very Viking style deployment and landed on the surface and go from there. So that's kind of what we're waiting on. Like you said, we don't get a ton of information from China. The orbital insertion itself was the most bizarro event to try and follow because the only information we had, like literally the only source of data was this amateur radio station in Germany who had pointed their antenna and was picking up the signal and they were just broadcasting like literally the wavy lines onto YouTube and we were just watching that trying to decipher what was going on so it's not it's not quite as fun as doing a NASA one where they're actually forthcoming with data I love that whole

like the amateur tracker situation though it's It makes it a lot of fun. It was fun, yeah. It's as much fun as we can have because they're not super open about it. I'm wondering about the way that they arrived at Mars. And I feel like I should know this, but were the Viking orbiters in polar orbits or were they equatorial? Oh, you're putting me on the spot now. I think they weren you know pure equatorial because they had to photograph quite a few different places um and the landing sites themselves were especially one of them was pretty high up so they had to be you know if not polar then they were some sort of like iss style like 50 60 degrees kind of thing so i was trying to

look it up because i it seemed strange to me that they would arrive in such an, uh, elliptical equatorial orbit and do that heavy plane change instead of trying to arrive in a way that sets them up for polar early on. Um, I don't know. I mean, I think I haven't done the math, but it just seems like you could do the plane change, you know,

on one of your trajectory correction maneuvers. And it would be, I've played a lot of KSP. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Me too. Um,

I think, I think it has to do with coming in equatorially means you can you can use mars as gravity to bend bend that uh insertion burn a little easier so i think you save fuel on the insertion burn even though you're putting some momentum into mars itself yeah exactly that makes sense all right i've settled that now in my brain um they the uh imager on chanwen is supposed to be like MRO-ish. Is there any sense as to like, are the images going to come out on that at all?

Is that something that we'll see at some point? Do you think it's going to be as good as a high-rise cam has been putting out there? Yeah, not quite as good as high-rise. So Tianwen has basically two cameras the same way that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter does. There's a high-res one and a medium-resolution one. They're both just slightly worse than the MRO ones.

I think high-res can do 30-40cm resolution, which is crazy. That's super high-res. The Tianwen one is maybe 2m. Not quite as good, but still pretty high-res. Versus the Context camera on high high rise, which is like six meters. And then their medium resolution one is actually it's way more. It's like 100 meters or something. So but the same sort of strategy where they're going to have a wide field of view to take large pictures and then they use the high resolution one to pinpoint landing spots and things like that so the the important thing there to note i believe is that the tianwen

one high rise or sorry the tianwen one high resolution camera is better than mro's medium resolution one which means that they are going to be learning new things they're going to be photographing parts of mars which have never been seen at that resolution before so i think it's pretty important i think that's why they're doing the scouting orbit because um like high rise is great but it has not done full coverage of mars they don't have like 100 of the planet photographed so because this is so it's such a high resolution you can't take that uh that many photographs so they're they're using that to get their own data about their landing sites and really you know understand it so i think it's gonna be good i think it's gonna be pretty useful data now as for when they're gonna release it and if they're gonna release it and how

i really have no answer for you the guy in germany who's been doing all the radio signal stuff i'll be decoding them before they actually put anything out yeah i'm sure they're they're well encrypted too but um the we can look to sort of the the moon missions for some sort of guidance on that i think you know so chunga three four five um are our science missions to the moon and china has released data for those not in any way the way that that nasa does it you know where it's like a pipeline that just gets streamed to the internet they were waiting like in year chunks and just doing a release you download as like a big zip file or something so um they give their their scientists a chance to really do their work with it first before they share it with

the world. I didn't realize that MRO had not covered all parts of Mars. That's an interesting tidbit. Like this is going to actually be breaking some new ground. I have not, I did not realize that. So that's cool to hear. With the high resolution camera. So the context one is covered like 99% of it. So, but yeah, high rise is just, it's too focused. So even though it's been around today's actually it's 15th birthday in orbit as we talked today so even though it's been around for 15 years it hasn't been able to to um you know really cover the whole planet they do a lot of like seasonal uh observations with high rise where they take the picture of the same place over and over and over again and so that kind of burns up some of their cycles right yeah and now they're tracking

too many rovers and all that they got to be covering landing sites and whatnot so uh the one thing i fear with chanwen is that everything has gone so well at mars uh this arrival season so that makes me nervous it's like this is going too well do you think i don't even want to put you on the spot do you think they have a good shot at like sticking this or it's gonna be hard man i mean this of the four spacecraft that have to kind of you know get to their destinations this season this is the one i'm most worried about um you know nasa's a pro at this they know how to land stuff on the surface and um the the edl sequence for for chan one is something that china has never done before they've landed on the moon but there is no atmosphere there and it is a whole different ball game uh all this you know time delay everything it no atmosphere there and it is a whole different ballgame.

All this, you know, time delay, everything. It's just, it's a lot for them. So I'm keeping an eye on it. But if there is a place where it's going to go wrong, to me, it feels like this is the place. I'm knocking on wood here to make sure I don't curse it. But yeah, I'm a little nervous too. That'll be interesting to see how that goes and then how the news is rolled out uh because if it goes poorly it might be like september before they say

anything yeah uh we actually might find out from high rise before anyone else this new crater all right let's talk about perseverance now i can't even say it let alone type it uh everything went incredibly if anyone's listening to this and has not you know seen the videos and the images that have been released of the entry descent landing i don't actually know how you ended up here quite honestly and i think you should pause and go look at all that kind of stuff so we don't have to cover all of the rollout um everything went great the images and videos are incredible unless you have anything specific to say about that stuff i'd love to hear now that we are into their early operations all all these instruments are being deployed, they've started to drive, where things are at with this,

what you're expecting to see over the next couple of weeks, and anything notable that you've seen yet from the mission. Yeah, so they're doing all the really exciting stuff right now of, you know, powering up this rover. So getting it to the surface is one thing, and then you kick over to operations and they have all these software upgrades to do. They got to, uh, you know, release all the mechanisms. So the mask can stand up and the antenna can flex and the arm can move around. And then they did their first drive. They're powering up instruments one by one and calibrating them. So it's, it's really been an exciting couple of weeks sort of like, cause you get, you get like a milestone every day or two where something new has happened. So it's been fun to watch.

One thing that's really hit me by surprise and it shouldn't have, but it has because I've just been so focused on sort of the EDL and the, the, the, you know, big picture with the, with the mission, but like the, the cameras on this thing are just incredible. Like they're just way better than I expected. I was, I think in my brain, I just sort of said, it's close enough to curiosity. They don't need to think about it. And I just expect the same thing, but like every camera is better. Um, the nav cams are in full color this time and they have this really rich, uh, chocolatey color to them. So they're just the lovely to see the, the mass cam Z, the mass cam Z on the top of the mast did this full 360

degree panorama and the zoom capability in this thing are just like unbelievable i cannot believe this picture i mean we talked about it on off nominal it was like my pick for for what this can do i can just i've pulled this up on my 38 inch monitor and just stared at it for like 10 20 minutes before um you can scroll side by side look at the rocks in the foreground look at the rocks in the background and it at the rocks in the background, and it's all like super high res. It's just awesome to see. So I'm so excited for what these cameras are going to be able to do. You know, mass cams got video capability. We're going to take some pictures of a helicopter pretty soon, which is like insane to even think about. Um, and I don't know what we're going to do with that. It's going to be incredible. Um, we've gotten some audio recordings

now, so we have microphones in this thing, which is great for podcasters uh i'm going to be using these sounds in all kinds of different ways i hope um and yeah so they're they're moving now so the rover is driven something like 70 80 meters uh away from its landing site they're trying to find a helipad right now for the helicopter so they can do their test flights and that's going to be a whole other big event that we have to kind of watch for it's gonna be fun it's interesting the way the helicopter has been positioned you know it is a tech demo they're not they're setting the expectations accordingly um but it's such an early priority like they need to do this as the first thing and that was even in the press conferences we're like we're prioritizing getting the helicopter down getting it deployed doing the flight um do you get the sense that that i guess what led to that

being the order of operations like that we'll do the helicopter and then we'll do all the science mission stuff and do you get any sense that people are getting antsy or was this built-in waiting period something that they planned for to take advantage of early on to do, you know, to look at the landing site, figure out the plans, like they essentially have a little bit more time to plan their future science work. I'm just curious about that balance between tech demo and then getting on with the science. Yeah, well, there is one technical reason that's driving that decision. So the helicopter right now is fastened to the bottom of the rover and it's kind of like hanging down underneath it and it has this big protective cover on it and it lowers the

profile of the bottom of the rover enough that they can't use their auto navigation software with it so basically the perseverance is equipped to move a lot faster than curiosity it's got a lot more ground to cover a lot more samples to collect all those kind of things. So it's going to try and drive on the order of twice as far in the same amount of time. And to do that, they have this advanced, you know, AI driven auto navigation software where the rover can sort of watch for rocks and move around them and not get slowed down by them. But I guess they need that clearance. I think part of the logic includes driving over rocks if they're small enough. And right now, they'd be hitting the helicopter as they drove over. So they can't do that until they get rid of this thing.

So that's kind of the big technical reason. But I think there's also just some benefits in terms of, you know, you're going to be landing in a roughly safe area because that's just by nature how it has to work. And so I may as well fly in a safe area as well. That's one way to kind of think about it. And I suppose the other half is that like, if this thing works it would benefit our science mission a lot because then we can do a better job scouting tomorrow's drive or we can do a better job looking at what's just over the horizon or just beyond the corner so it does probably you know lean them in certain directions if they do have a helicopter that is operational to make better decisions as they drive up this river delta uh that'll be cool

to see how that integrates you know with the mission at large if it works out overall that's one where they're being really coy with it right so they're really laying on the tech demo part of it like this is probably going to break and we shouldn't expect to ever need to ever like do not count on this in any way but uh knowing nasa it'll probably work pretty good well i was gonna say if you listen to the my appearance on we martians uh that is happening as well they probably should have contacted someone from the sls green run team and just had a quick chat about expectation setting it's yes good examples of you know the two ways to go about this yeah yeah so yeah i hope it flies and that

it's actually useful and they're able to you know, I don't think it'll last a winter. Like even, even if it works really great, I think it'll probably, I mean, to me it should just crash. That should be like the way it goes. That's like an honorable death for it. Um, but even if it, if it doesn't like just the winter will be tough on that little guy. Um, but I hope that in the meantime it will have an opportunity to contribute a little bit to the science and guide this rover around and get some scouting done.

Cause that'd be pretty cool. Proof of of concept for for how this would work in a in a more you know traditional manner maybe someday they can instead of using a sky crane you just land the sucker with the helicopter there you go yeah that solves two problems at once a dragonfly approach yeah there you go all right let's talk about some future stuff now because for a long time and i'm going to talk specifically about NASA here, I feel like we've been in this mode where there's always another rover coming down the line. We've got all these big flagship missions that we can kind of count on. We were driving around with Spirit and Opportunity talking about Curiosity. We were landing Curiosity talking about Mars 2020.

We are now at the point where Mars 2020 is the first of the three sample return missions this is going to be caching samples across the surface and I think in its is it going to keep a couple of samples as well on board or something it's going to try and not to I think it's going to try and get rid of all of them right dump them all out

so Mars sample return program itself is going to be this series of missions but that's really the last big managed mission that NASA has. I would love to hear a little bit about what, as somebody like yourself who's looking at like, we need more Mars missions, what is coming up on the exploration roadmap, non-NASA and NASA alike? And, you know, how do you see that going over the next decade or so? and NASA alike. And, you know, how do you see that going over the next decade or so? Yeah, well, you hit the nail on the head in terms of like, it's a, it's an inflection point, right? Because just like you said, so the the Mars sample return mission, which is three missions, but you know, one big program is basically just dominating the entire Mars exploration program right now at NASA, it's the only thing they're thinking about, it's a huge budget sink, you know, it's got a tremendous

amount of technical risk and a tremendous amount of reward on the line. So it's a big, big project and so much that it's actually got its own organizationally. They keep it outside of the Mars Exploration Office. There's a whole MSR group that lives outside of that and they come in from the side and report directly into HQ. They're they're very very focused on this getting it right um but there's also all these other circumstances happening at the same time uh the infrastructure at Mars is aging you know we just talked about Mars reconnaissance orbiter 15 years old today uh it's like one of the younger orbiters uh Odyssey is 20 years old um so there's there's a lot of stuff going on in terms of the infrastructure and having to make decisions about that if you want to keep doing things the way you've always done them there's

a new decadal survey happening right now so nasa sort of commissions these reports every 10 years to ask for the community consensus on you know where to go next with science and the one we're in right now is expiring in a year and a half or so and so they're building the next next one, that's going to be driving some change into the program, for sure. And then we have all these commercial developments in space, you know, we're seeing a lot of change happening at the moon in terms of science, because of commercial opportunities, and the launch industry, how is that going to affect Mars, we don't really know yet. And so it really does feel like there's there is a bit of an inflection point in terms of the program for NASA.

So NASA, thankfully, did sort of see this coming. And right before the pandemic, they commissioned a report that was basically asking, can you solve the problem of how do we explore Mars while we're doing Mars sample return? How do we not give up on everything else while we try to do this? What's the solution there? That report actually came out just this past November, it didn't get a lot of headlines, but it's starting to kind of surface a little bit now. And there's there are some ways to do it. There's some really interesting solutions that they're presenting in terms of like leveraging small satellites and trying to break down science into

more manageable chunks. And you you know they're calling them like these mission arcs and stuff and they're they're trying to build a series of missions where you can start with something cheap like a small sat and they may move to a discovery or new frontiers class and and and really kind of get that going so you can still do stuff but a lot of technology development as well it's one of their big focuses is saying let's invest in some of these uh small satellite technologies and other kind of instrument technologies so that when Mars sample return is done, you're set and ready to go to answer the next big question. So there's a lot of stuff up in the air right now. It's quite a big thing.

One thing that was interesting from that report was the I liked the way that they phrased it was like decide the data that you want and then essentially start with the smallest spacecraft you can to get that data yeah i liked that as a model because i don't know how this stuff has went internally but it kind of felt like hey let's do a big flagship rover what can we do with it you know now we have a one ton rover on the surface and it's it flips that right and it's like okay well we just want this one thing can we send a 200 kilogram satellite to do that? If that were the future model, I would be into that. Yeah, and the Mars exploration program has followed sort of the one big science objective, right? They started with kind of follow the water, and now they're looking for signs of habitability and signs of life. Like, there's always been this kind of top line question, which the flagships have been really going after. So, breaking them into these mission arcs is

interesting, like you said. So you know, one of the arcs, for example, is like looking at ancient environments and habitability. So it's like a very specific part of Mars science. And the report kind of came up with four examples of different arcs you could do. I don't know if NASA will actually go through with those ones or different ones or whatever. But it's an interesting concept. And it does actually line up with what the decadal survey is planning so um we do know that this decadal survey coming out is going to have a bit of a different format in the past they've always sort of presented like chapters of the report as like locations so like here's the venus chapter here's the mars chapter here's the ocean worlds chapter and here's the missions and science you

should do in those places they're kind of of flipping that and looking at questions instead. So like, if we want to go look for life, here's the missions you should go. And some of those will be to Mars and some of those will be to Europa, et cetera. And so by putting the science objective before the location, it flips that around. That kind of is in line with this. And so maybe, I mean, to me, maybe the way to win at Mars now is because we have so many or orbiters and landers and rovers there, and we have such a broad data set with Mars. Um, maybe we should be looking more granular now and breaking those down and sort of letting different parts of the community go after those things and seeing which ones go farther and faster. Right.

The decadal survey itself, um um being focused on that kind of level of like here are the answers that we want i'm i'm interested in like you know we we have these converging storylines of new decadal survey and new technology and technology developments like marco a and b were these cube sats that helped out with InSight's arrival that worked out really well, so sort of proved out the viability of small satellites in interplanetary space. Where do those things come together? Is that a NASA program decision to say, we got to answer these questions and now we have this technology to do it? Or does the decadal survey itself take that context into consideration? It does a little bit. So the survey is primarily focused

on the science questions that need to be answered, but it takes in the context of, you know, what missions are already flying, so which data sets would be complementary. It looks into workforce, it looks into technology and cost, it looks into rockets. So there's a lot of things that kind of factor in it, because really, like the science community, what they want is they want to set up NASA for success, right? They want to be able to say, like, this is our recommendation for the the way forward that we think has the highest probability of success. And so NASA takes that as a recommendation as a pretty serious recommendation, it weighs a lot into their decisions. but then ultimately they do have to make those decisions because then all the

politics and then the budget lines come into play and they have to sort of balance those things. But the survey is pretty comprehensive. Like when these things come out, there are three, 400 page reports and you know, there's a lot to read into them if you want to really get into the nitty gritty of,

of, of what the science community wants to do. And that's right. There's why you listen to we Martians, because I'm not reading that thing. I'll tell you that right now. I don't even read the full report, so don't worry about it. All right. One other bit that's kind of related to that question is this concept of communications at Mars is a thing. You mentioned the old orbiters. We're very reliant on this.

I mean, you can talk to all the rovers direct from Earth and direct back to Earth, but it's very low bandwidth. It's not preferred. That's kind of a worst case scenario. So the communications problem has been something that we've talked about for years. There was recently this idea floated, or I don't even know exactly what form that was in. I can't remember at this point to have a commercial company bid on these communication services, send a satellite to orbit, potentially even a small constellation of satellites in orbit to provide communication services. This seems like something that is massively important. In the same way of that last question, would the decadal survey have the purview to say like, Mars is really important for these questions, but we can't do anything without having communications? Or would that be a decision that the higher ups at NASA headquarters would need to say

like, we have to prioritize this? I guess I'm looking for like, who can I be annoyed at that we don't have this program yet? Yeah, it's a it's a tricky decision because it's the it's not direct science, right? So like the decadal surveys is they're they're they're tracking that because they're realizing you know if if they have problems getting data back especially if there's data that gets captured on board a spacecraft and never makes it home because there's no room in the pipe right and that's why mars is different

is that like we have all these things there now like yeah communications orbiter around the moon or venus would be cool as well but they're nothing is dependent on that and that's why i'm leaning this direction is that like this seems like a thing that should be causing major strife in the people that are writing the decadal survey yeah and especially we just you know we talked about perseverance and all this high resolution stuff and video like they're gonna soak up a lot of like this rover has already been uh real chatty with like every orbiter you know odyssey mars reconnaissance orbiter they're they're leveraging bonus bandwidth from the european trace gas orbiter and maven is now like how to adjust its orbit to to accommodate more

relays so they're making a lot of uh compromises in order to make this work so you'd think it would it would be an important thing to do um i'm sure the survey will identify it as a risk, um, you know, to say this is something that's affecting us now. Uh, ultimately though, that is sort of an implementation detail. So probably falls more on the NASA side rather than the, the science community. Um, but I think it all ends up tracing back to, like we talked about this inflection point um nasa needs to make a conscious decision right now do we want to continue the mars program the way we have for the last 20 years because that was that was also a conscious choice where they said let's not send one mission to mars let's send

one every window and see what all this science in aggregate can do together you know is is the sum of all the missions at mars greater than their individual parts? I think we've learned that yes, it is, but it also comes with a cost. And so with this sample return, sort of coming into a choke point in the program, NASA needs to make that decision. Do we want to, after sample return, go back to the same format and keep sending a mission every launch window, in which case maybe an infrastructure investment like a communications orbiter makes sense? Or are they saying, actually, you know what, this is sort of reached the end, we need to get people here or we need to, you know, to solve these questions from the decadal, we need to spend more time at Europa and Venus or whatever, we'll have to kind of see. So it's a it's another another point where we need to kind of wait for a decision, which is really interesting,

right? Yeah, it's it's, I mean, it's, for you personally, it might be a bit of a bummer, but it is a very interesting moment in time where like, you know, you're right in that we sort of had settled into like this model. And it dominated the conversations about planetary exploration throughout the solar system. So, you know, that it does definitely seem like we're going to get some large answers and maybe the commercial communications thing as a leading indicator. If it if they do extend that as an official program, that would indicate that they need that for the future. Yeah. So maybe that's a good first thing to watch for. And there's also this whole commercial side of it, right? So we've seen in other different areas in space where once the the cost of it becomes too much for a government you find try and find out how much you can offload into the private sector right um one of the things that this report we just talked about identified was

that there should definitely be they don't know if it's the right answer but we should definitely be exploring the idea of eclipse program for mars so um a commercial mars payload services whatever you want to call it it's not it's not a good of an acronym but um so you know is there is there a market for how to payload the surface of mars i don't know i'm probably not that doesn't really scream to me like i think we're still trying to answer that question on the moon honestly yeah as i say i'm still out to lunch on the moon part of that one so we'll see but um maybe communications is the place where we can offload some of that uh that uh cost right and see if it uh i mean i can't imagine that's not something

spacex would want to jump at right because they're going to want to set up their own mars infrastructure and getting practice operating a spacecraft in mars orbit communicating a bunch of data back they can do all kinds of stuff they're leveraging their starlink technology it's a perfect fit they just gotta get all the ducks lined up, right? Every day that goes by, I'm shocked that they have not done that yet. Nike, it just seems like a thing that they should have done. So I am with you on that being a thing

that we should watch for in the future and that they should do. So I think that's the end of my list here, Jake. I would, if there's anything I missed that we should talk about at Mars, or if not, everyone should go listen to Wee Martians. Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty good rundown. There is a lot going on still.

So the arrivals are all done, but there's plenty of events happening. Like I say, Perseverance is going to be real exciting over the next, you know, four to eight weeks as this helicopter gets off the ground. They're going to have their first sample drilled, you know, in the spring, which is going to be fantastic. This whole complicated sample caching system that's the most complex instrument we've ever sent to another planet. So it's going to be fun to watch. Let me do a little plug for you as well. If you're somebody who listens to this show

and you listen to Miko headlines that I do every week, Jake does a similar thing about Mars. And a part of that every week is like the surface updates and you track all the things that Perseverance is doing on the surface. And I feel like it's something that if people are curious about every turn that it makes and what it's doing, what it's deploying, that is like a must have thing in your podcast feed. So you can clip that out and use it on your show. I appreciate that.

Yeah, I stole the idea from you fully admit it. So it's a good little format. But, you know, I cover the ops every week. So even even curiosity, which is not getting a lot of headlines right now, I'm still talking about how far it drove and where it drilled and what it's looking at. So it's, it's fun to kind of keep a tab on these missions as they proceed through their lifespans. All right. Well, thanks, Jake. Hopefully you'll be back again to contain or to keep your title here on the most often Miko guest. Yeah. Every time that Peter Beck comes on, I got to make sure I get on right after that just to keep the title. There you go. Keeping that bang. Thanks again to Jake for coming on the show. It's always great to do these crossover episodes with him. As I mentioned up front, I'm appearing over on the Wee Martians feed as well alongside this episode. So check that out if we want to talk about the big rockets that we tend to track here on the show. We talk a little bit about how it applies to some of the things that Jake's looking at. And it's a great time to check out Wee Martians if you have not yet and get that in

your life because it's definitely an awesome show. And as we talked about, Red Planet Review is definitely a go-to of mine. Keeps me up to date, and it should keep you up to date as well. But for now, that's all I've got for you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for the support, as always, at mainenginecutoff.com. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com, or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time, hope you're enjoying all the space news

and all the podcasts, and I'll talk to you soon.