NASA's Curious Universe - We're Going to Mars!

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

In this episode of our Curious Universe podcast, join us on a journey to the Red Planet.

I had just started on the team. This was about maybe six months to a year in. The science office, they said, you know what, we need to send the engineers to the Mojave Desert. There was one, I think this was towards the tail end of the trip. They took us to a site. They gave us a map. And they said, okay, you are now the rover. And this is the only information that you have. These are just images, aerial images of the area nearby, go tell us where you would find evidence of life. It kind of made me think like, ah, like one day we could be walking on the surface of Mars and maybe doing the same exercise. So that was kind of cool. This is NASA's curious universe. I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. My name is Christina Hernandez, and I'm a pillar

systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Christina is one of the engineers that helped build the Mars Perseverance Rover, which will soon allow us to explore Mars in a way we've never been able to before. Ever wonder if there's life beyond our home planet? Some key answers might be locked up a little further into the solar system on Mars. And over the past few years, NASA's been building a rover that might be. Just hold the key. When I started, we were still at a paper design.

And we were just focused on trying to understand if it was the right design and how we were actually going to build this beast of a rover. And now, right, in the recent years, we've transitioned to what I love the most about engineering now is, you know, building hardware, testing hardware, and eventually building the flight rover and flight instruments. It's taken 10 years to get the Mars Perseverance rover ready for launch day. This summer, the rover will embark on a hunt for signs of ancient life on Mars.

The historic mission will be the first step in a round-trip mission to Mars. It will collect rock samples for future return to Earth. The Apollo lunar samples, collected by astronauts decades ago, are still allowing us to make discoveries about the moon. There's no telling what samples from the red planet could teach us. And that's why these samples are at the core of the mission's four key goals. So the first goal is, did life ever exist on Mars, right? Is there evidence of past life? And we have so many great science instruments that are going to help us answer those questions. The second goal is to learn more about the climate on Mars. What's Mars climate life?

We want to know how it became what it is today. And at the same time, learning about Mars climate could also help us understand our own Earth climate, which is always important. The third goal is to understand the geology of Mars. The sort of thing that Christina was learning about on that trip she took to the Mojave Desert. And then there's the last goal. Which is the goal that, you know, as a little kid, this is the one I always dreamt of, is we are finally preparing. for human exploration on Mars, right?

It's an actual goal, right? It's always been a vision. It's always been a dream. But on this rover, it is one of our four science goals. And so that's why we're going to Mars. And that's why folks like me are so excited for this mission because this is cutting-edge stuff. But perseverance still has a ways to go before it starts on these goals.

In late July, the mission's launch window opens. After leaving from the Kennedy Space Center, It will take the rover seven months to travel to Mars. That means it'll get there in February 2021, at which point it will have to complete one of the most difficult parts of the entire mission. We're talking about entry, descent, and landing, or EDL, the EDL process. It's known as the seven minutes of terror.

For that period of time, NASA will not be able to communicate with the rover, and the computer will have to move the mission through a perfectly choreographed set of motions without any help from the ground. Mitch Schulte, the Mars Exploration Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters, will walk us through what the EDL process will look like for perseverance. The entry part is when the rover first hits the top of the atmosphere of Mars. The heat shield then starts to interact with the atmosphere, creating a lot of friction. This creates a lot of heat, but it also takes some of the energy out of the spacecraft as a

that's coming into Mars. The heat shield eventually drops off after we've gotten through enough of the atmosphere and slowed it down enough. At that point, we have a parachute that deploys out of the back shell that opens up at hypersonic speed, so it's going faster than the speed of sound.

And we have a very large parachute then that helps us slow it down even further. And then by the time that the parachute slows us down enough, the rover will drop out of the back shell that's carrying the parachute, so we'll be free of the parachute. At that point, what will happen is that there's a radar on board the rover that will detect where the ground is and fire the retro rockets that will finally allow us to get the rest of the way down to the surface of Mars. So we're going to a place on Mars called Jezero Crater, J-E-Z-E-E-R-O.

This is actually a crater that was once filled with a lake, and it's in a really ancient part of Mars, about three and a half billion years old. This area of Jezero Crater, which is now dry, there's no liquid water in it now, but there's evidence in the rock record that there was a liquid water lake there three and a half billion years ago and everywhere we go here on Earth where we have liquid water, we find life. We in the Mars exploration program

like to point out that we've been sending things to Mars for quite some time and we'll be happy when the humans finally get there but we've got an entire planet inhabited by robots at the moment. What we're really trying to establish on Mars is whether there was life there in its ancient past. So now that we've established that there was liquid water early in Mars' history, we think that it could have been habitable like Earth was and is now.

So we really want to get after this idea of establishing what kinds of places on Mars were habitable and whether life actually did get a start on Mars. And so what we're doing in sending all of this technology and these technology demonstrations and this hardware to Mars is really helping us move. forward in the technologies that will enable humans to visit Mars. Now you might be wondering, what will perseverance look like as it's roving around Mars? And what will it be doing? Well, it looks very similar to curiosity.

Because it's the same design, and the reason that we use the same design is one, we know it works really well on curiosity. Imagine a car-sized robot with extra limbs and a camera for a head. We have upgraded the wheels. It turns out the rover actually is pretty heavy. Perseverance clocks in at 2,260 pounds. So that's been putting some strain on the wheels. We've corrected that, redesigned the wheels,

and so the wheels are going to be much better this time around. One of the great things that we do have is data to try and understand the different types of terrain and also the slopes that the rover could see. The perseverance is equipped to kind of handle different types of terrain because of the wheels. And we even have requirements to say, look, we need to be able to travel up slopes that are, you know, 20 degrees high, right? Because we need to be able to just be prepared for if there is something interesting that's really going to drive us over there. We have to

be ready. Christina likes to think of the different pieces of perseverance as they relate to the human body. So, for example, you know, within the rover, right, within that kind of that big box, all the vital organs, all like the sensitive electronics that kind of give life to the rover, that's where that's kept. When you think about, you know, the rover, right, the rover's kind of like a robotic scientist, right? We try and pack as much as we can of what a geologist would do, what tools they would bring, and put that on the rover. We've got the brains, which is obviously the electronics and the software that control everything. We also have the neck and the head, which on the rover, we call that the mast, the remote sensing mass. And the remote sensing mass on Perseverance has all these really neat

cameras that are going to help the rover see and ears. We have a microphone provided by the Supercam team on the rover, which is like a first and really cool. And, you know, obviously the wheels, right? We got to rove around and go check things out. And as Perseverance is doing all of this, it's got to keep us in the loop. And the way we talk to Earth is through our antennas. And so that's what we use to speak to Earth and also allow Earth to say hi back and check in on us. So that's kind of like the overview of the rover. It's always exciting to get messages from the rovers through those antennas, receiving pictures and data as it explores the red planet.

But this time, we're hoping to get something else. We've successfully landed eight robots on Mars before, two of which are still working, and each of them have helped us understand the planet a bit better. But perseverance is taking us a step further. Unlike other missions that have brought samples back from celestial objects before, like comets and asteroids, this time we're bringing samples back from a planetary body, Mars, that may have had life on it. We're trying to bring pieces of another planetary body all the way back to Earth.

And we're hoping that those pieces, the samples, might help us answer a question. Did life ever exist on Mars? We want to make sure that we do the best job in collecting these samples, and we're going to be doing it from 150 million miles away. Kind of like when Christina and the other engineers went to the Mojave Desert, and we're told to look for rocks that might show signs of life. But instead of a short drive across California, we're talking about a seven-month journey through space.

And instead of our own two hands, we've got a car-sized semi-autonomous robot doing the job. So they've built in a lot of technology that will enable careful handling of the samples and make sure that we get the best possible samples that we can get. And when you bring a sample back to Earth, you can give that sample to institutions across the world, have them use their labs, have them study it for decades to come, right? And it's huge, right?

While sample collection is one of the most exciting parts of the rover's mission, Perseverance will be quite the multitasker. One of the instruments will test out how we might convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. This could fuel future rockets to get them back to Earth, in the event that, you know, we get humans there and they want to come home. Another instrument will monitor the weather on Mars, keeping track of temperature, humidity, and dust size. Each of Perseverance's instruments will help us achieve the mission's main science goals. This will also be the first rover to bring along a companion.

We are going to send, okay, and I got it like really, like you got to really process this. We are going to send a helicopter with the rover, right? So for the first time outside of Earth's atmosphere, we are going to be flying on another planet, right? And so ingenuity, which is our Mars helicopter's name, you know, is going to take flight once we land on Mars. And that is pretty amazing that, you know, some crazy team at JPL, right, put together this helicopter. And we're like, yeah, let's bring it along. Let's go and figure out if we can fly on another planet because that is going to even increase our capabilities even more. So we've built a little house for the helicopter on the underside of the rover.

And so after the rover lands, it's going to get lowered down to the ground. It's folded up inside this house. It's going to get lower down to the ground on cables. The cables are going to get detached from the rover. The rover will drive away, and then the helicopter will unfold itself and be ready to fly. Ingenuity will be able to give us an aerial perspective of Mars, making observations that could tell us how we might use the planet's resources one day. We have lots of cameras on perseverance,

so we'll be able to take all kinds of great pictures and probably some video of the helicopter doing its thing. will also have a video camera on the helicopter itself, so it will be taking video as it's flying. Imagine this. In the future, when humans are on Mars, they may call on helicopters, like ingenuity, to scout out new locations and investigate cliffs, caves, and deep craters. The helicopters could even carry small payloads of supplies. But before any of that happens, a test vehicle has to prove that flying on Mars is even possible. And that's what ingenuity is going to do. So at the moment we have five demonstration flights planned, each one a little bit longer than the last one.

And so we're going to first make sure that it actually lifts up off the ground and can actually fly. And then we'll test and see how long we can do that. And then if we get creative, we can start to maybe maneuver it around a little bit. Mars perseverance is a pioneer, a robotic scientist that will travel to Mars and attempt to learn its secrets. The rover will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center soon. The launch window is set from July 30th to August 15th. But no matter when it launches from Earth, if all goes as planned, roughly seven months from now,

on February 18th, 2021, we'll get some photos back from perseverance as it takes its first look at this foreign landscape. And it'll be clear, we're not in the Mojave Desert anymore. I keep kind of thinking about the launch and, you know, I know I'm going to cry. I know I'm going to laugh and jump and just be super excited because this project has really meant everything. Like, everybody on this team has given it their all.

And, you know, we've all made the sacrifice of, you know, not being home on holidays, weekends. You give it your all because we know it's going to be such a rewarding thing to see this thing launched. Perseverance means everything, and this was my first flight project, right? I've never sent anything outside of Earth before. I couldn't have picked a better name for this personal and this team milestone. I mean, to me, perseverance means grit and passion. When we say, like, do you have the right stuff?

To me, part of it is perseverance. It's understanding the sacrifice. understanding that everyone's in the same boat, being empathetic to your team members when they're having rough days, and building this robotic vehicle that's going to go and collect samples and do cutting at science and, yeah, let's throw a helicopter in while we're at it. Like, this mission, this name, it manifests the last five years of my life, like in all aspects. You know, this is what engineering is. And this is what science is, and I couldn't have done this anywhere else.

That's what it means. This is NASA's Curious Universe. The Curious Universe team includes Klaus Meyer, Michaela Sosby, and Vicki Woodburn. Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson. Special thanks to Rylund Heggy, Joby Harris, Jim Green, Andrew Good, and Liz Landau. If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review. tweeting about the show at NASA and sharing us with a friend. For more interviews about NASA's search for life,

check out the latest season of our Gravity Assist podcast, hosted by NASA's chief scientist, Dr. Jim Green. Search for it in your favorite podcast app, or find it in other podcasts at nassadgov slash podcasts.