Off-Nominal - 07 - FLying Around Mars Imaging aNd Geography Observatory

Episode Date: April 10, 2018

Tanya Harrison joins Jake and Anthony to discuss the James Webb Space Telescope delays, planetary missions and their ability to stay under budget and on time, and the benefits and drawbacks of decadal surveys. Beers Dortmunder Gold - Great Lakes Brewing Company - Untappd Commodore Perry IPA - Great Lakes Brewing Company - Untappd Oumuamua - Driftwood Brewery - Untappd Topics SSB: Space Studies Board NASA delays JWST launch to 2020 - SpaceNews.com Tanya Harrison on Twitter: “In reference to discussions yesterday about whether the next astronomy & astrophysics decadal survey should be delayed to see what happens with JWST” Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites KH-11 Kennen - Wikipedia File:KH-11-best-SHIPYARD.jpg - Wikimedia Commons Picks Planet Earth: Blue Planet II | BBC America Malin Space Science Systems Captioned Image Release, MSSS-524 Satellite images from highly oblique angles are pretty mindblowing | Ars Technica Follow Tanya Tanya of Mars Tanya Harrison (@tanyaofmars) | Twitter tanyaofmars | Redbubble Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter

DLS and go for main engine start. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Off Nominal. I'm ribbing here because Anthony just typed at the very last second, Jake do the intro, and I was not prepared for it. I realized the one thing we forgot was somebody has to start the show. Someone has to start, yeah. Jake, we've got another friend with us.

Yes, we do have another friend with us. Everyone say hello to Tanya Harrison. Tanya, how you doing? Hey, doing well. We're so excited to have you here today. You know, not only are you a very, very important Martian in our world. You do lots of other cool space stuff too. And so you make a very good compliment to some of the, you know, an actual professional,

smart person compliment to the. Professional smart person. That's just going to go on my business car now. Yeah, I really need that one. Because otherwise, Anthony can I just go off on a tangent and it's never really, you know, never really a qualified answer. It's just mostly conspiracy theories and complaints. There's only a couple of those. There's not too many of those. There's only been one or two so far.

But this is upping the legitimacy of the show quite a bit. Yes, definitely. And thanks for, you know, for being flexible with the schedule. I know you're a very busy person. But I will say that yesterday was, I think it was like national beer day. Oh, no. Oh, I'm so sorry.

I guess that and that's, that's on you. So, you know. Great start. Good intro. I should have probably done the intro. Welcome to the show. Well, with that, it was really great talking to you guys. Like, I got to go now.

Cool. Okay. So, yeah, let's talk about drinks. Who wants to go first? Well, last time you said the guest has to go first. So I think we should keep it going. Okay. Okay, so I told you guys an email already.

I'm not a beer drinker. So I only really do cocktails if I drink alcohol at all. And I thought it would be appropriate that we do Heart of the Galaxy cocktails, which are inspired by a discovery that the Europeans made a few years ago. They discovered that there's a gas cloud at the center of the galaxy called Sagittarius B that is made up of many things, but including the component, Ethel Formate, which is found in raspberries and rum. And so a professor here on campus decided to turn that into a cocktail.

And we joke about it a lot in ASU's what we call the Interplanetary Initiative in this project that I'm leading, dealing with the senses in space. So we're trying to do entertaining things with that. So I have some stuff in my awesome in-your-face mug here that I'm sorry, the Discord people can't see. But this is the best thing to come out of my time working for Mail and Space Science. systems. They gave all the employees these mugs. And this has got

coconut water and raspberry flavored rum in it with some muddled raspberries in the bottom. So it's not anything super fancy, but it's the most I could do. That's some planning too. You had the whole thing going there. I was ready for you guys.

I was ready. That sounds like I went to God, where was I? Some, I don't know, some tropical place and they had, you know, they had drinks and everyone was ordering pinacoladas but then if you were really cool you got what they called a Miami Vice which is like half peanut colada and the other half was like a raspberry dacry like a frozen so it was like raspberries and coconut and rum so it kind of sounds the same I think oh yeah there you go yeah so I know from from that analog that it's

probably delicious so anything with raspberries is delicious right Anthony what do you got so I've got a thing here. I'm trying something new, but I'm tying it into my pick at the end. So it's a little foreshadowing. So you can consider what it is. But I went down to the local beer joint, grabbed something from Great Lakes Brewing Company, which I have not had before, located in Cleveland, Ohio. So not too far away. So I've got the Dortmund Gold Lager, and then I didn't bring this up with two people with Canadian ties here, but the Commodore

Perry Indian Parail. It was the one war where we didn't do super great, but there we go. So I'm giving a shot. Great Lakes is the foreshadowing there for the pick. Awesome. I just tried the logger. It's nice and crisp. Cool.

So I have, I've been foreshadowing this one, so some of the Discordians will know, but someone sent this to me. Okay, so someone sent this recommendation to me, and I don't remember where it was. I looked through my Twitter mentions. I looked through my email. I looked through like Facebook messages. I couldn't find who sent this to me. So if you're out there, person who recommended this,

I really appreciate it. But this is, it's from Driftwood Brewery in Victoria on the island. And it's O Muamua Mewa Milk Stout. So it's like a super interstellar beer, I guess. The bottle's awesome. It's really good. Is that already have,

is that like brand new? And they've got like some sort of interstellar rock looking situation? Like what is going on there? It looks like they tried to fashion it after like the, the spaceship that everyone thought it looked like. What was at the rendezvous at Ramos or whatever? What was it? Is it RCC Clark, I think?

But anyway, yeah, they went with the spaceship, look for it. But, yeah, it should be good. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty fast. It's like a limited edition. Like, it just came out, I don't know, maybe like five weeks ago. But I had to go to like a specialty beer store in Vancouver to find it. So hopefully it's good because that would be really embarrassing if it wasn't.

Okay. So, Anthony, do you want to start with emails? What do we start? What's our format? I don't know. I'm always thinking that emails are later, because let's just go into some topics. Okay, let's do it. So I think, yeah, you're wearing the shirt. So I think what we wanted to talk about today was, well, I think it started because the James Webb News came down, right? because there was this whole big, and I love how NASA kind of foreshadows it, you know, like the week before they were like, oh, by the way, we're expecting a report back, things maybe don't look good.

And they kind of like warm you up, too, the bad news. And then it came down at the end of last month that there's another massive delay with James Webb and, you know, another cost overrun is likely. And so we were talking about it. And I think, you know, we got to this kind of discussion about, why why does it keep going over its schedule? Why does it cost so much money?

Why do all these projects do that? And we were drawing the comparisons to SLS, which keeps going over. And then we were talking about planetary, and that is kind of a different story. Like, they seem to be much more on time. And we were trying to figure out why this was. So we thought, you know, it's probably just a really good conversation point, especially with someone who's qualified. And Tanya, but you went to some,

you went to some meetings a couple weeks ago that were, this is where the news was announced, I think, right? So do you want to walk us through sort of what that was? Yeah, so a couple of weeks ago, there's a group called the Space Studies Board that meets in Washington, D.C. at the National Academy of Science. And it's comprised of different sub-panels of stuff related to NASA. So we have things for astronomy and astrophysics, heliophysics, planetary science, human spaceflight, and earth sciences. And I served on the Committee for Astronomy an astrophysics panel, even though I haven't been an astronomer for a long time. So I was a little surprised to be assigned to that panel, but it was very education.

It was back in like your Washington days, hey? Yeah, it's been, oh gosh, like 12 years or something since I published an astronomy paper, like not a Mars paper. So I had to channel that a little bit and fake it. They wanted someone who was around when James Webb was starting out. I think that's what it was. Exactly. Do you remember the original meetings? So they had told us, we saw in our schedule, you know, there's going to be a lot of discussion of James Webb. And we were kind of bracing ourselves. And the announcement came out of something like 1130 in the morning during one of the days of the meeting.

And they literally brought the meeting to a halt. They were like, okay, you've all been on the edge of your seat waiting for this. We're letting you know that James Webb has been delayed again. And a lot of the next day, we got different talks from various folks at Nassau. But there was a big talk from Paul Hertz from NASA headquarters, and he kind of went over the causes of the delays and then comparing James Webb to other smaller-scale missions like Tess, which is an exoplanet hunting mission and planetary science, like you said. Because we also, we didn't just talk about NASA missions. We talked about cost overruns through the National Science Foundation for things like ground-based telescopes. And there was a lot of referencing to planetary science having their act together and having everything kind of.

generally going well. We've had some hiccups with things like curiosity, but generally the planetary missions do pretty well. And a lot of this just, like the easiest explanation is complexity. James Webb is, really Paul has described it, a civilization scale mission. It's absolutely massive, like literally and figuratively. And we're doing a lot of things with it that we've never tried before,

like this massive sunshade deployment. And there's been just lots of small problems along the way, well, small and large problems, that I've just kind of added up over time to lead to these cost overruns and schedule delays. So it's not necessarily a great excuse for the fact that it has gone so far over budget and so far out of its original schedule planning.

And it's starting to affect other missions as well, like in the call. for the budget for next year. As it stands, the W-First mission is set to be canceled, specifically because of the cost overruns of James Webb. Whether that's actually going to happen or not, we'll find out probably depends on what happens with James Webb over the next year. But yeah, complexity is probably the biggest thing. If you look at planetary missions, oh, sorry, Jake, you can say something. Well, I was just going to say, so I'm not trying to remember where I read it because I read a lot of stuff today, but there was something like 10, 10,

key technologies that were happening on James Webb were brand new. Actually, no, I know exactly what it was. I listened to the, it was a planetary radio, I had their space policy edition out, and they talked about it a little bit. And yeah, it's like 10 brand new technologies that had never been tried before are part of Web. And that finally it clued into me because in the article that came out for it, it was like, Zerbukin had a quote that it was like, you know,

W-first is a lot simpler and there's a lot less groundbreaking stuff on it. So it's not as much danger. It doesn't have this huge deployment strategy. And he said, which requires 10 miracles to happen for it to work. I was like, okay, that's maybe where the 10 miracles thing comes from is these 10 new technologies. Oh, you're muted there. There you go. Can you hear me now?

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I was like moving in my chair. So I was trying not to make it really loud. This chair's really squeaky. Yeah, it's a lot of new stuff to throw into a single mission. And, you know, planetary learned their lesson the hard way with like Mars Observer, where we had a bunch of of stuff, all our eggs in one basket lost the mission. And from there, moved on to the whole faster, better, cheaper model of NASA in the 90s. Like, okay, if we send smaller,

cheaper things more frequently, then if we do lose something, it's less of a blow to the entire program as it stands. But we've kind of been building up from there more and more expensive, more and more complicated missions again. And James Webb is like the penultimate in terms of complexity that we could possibly be doing in a mission at this point. But when you look at planetary missions, even with stuff that's getting more complicated like curiosity compared to the rovers before it, there's a lot of heritage there. Everything that they have, they've generally done before. Things where had hiccups with the curiosity were generally things that hadn't been done before, like the Zoom mechanisms on the original mass cams that are now going to be on the Mars 2020 rover. And hopefully we've fixed all the problems that we ran into with the actual Zoom mechanisms for that.

But generally, you don't have a lot of stuff that's groundbreaking and new. I guess the sky crane was groundbreaking, you know, I'm curious. Yeah, that was a little weird. I don't think any of us that worked on the mission actually thought that the sky crane was going to work. Like, even after having Adam Stelzner sit down and explain how it worked, it was like, no way. We're all going to lose our jobs on August 5th of this year. So the fact that it worked was absolutely incredible. it's a huge feat of technology

and hopefully we'll have similar miracles with James Webb but it has been running into a lot of problems One thing that I saw in the I don't know if it was at the meeting or in the comments afterwards is that NASA was going to be putting a lot of people into the North of Gromon facilities in the next I don't know year or so to like just have another level of oversight

which sounds scary to me I would be interested from someone who's worked on these kind of projects. More cooks in the kitchen is not going to help this thing get done sooner in a lot of ways. You know, there's, at this point, we kind of know the issues that are there. They're working through all these things. Is that, does that make you nervous as much as it makes me the uninformed outsider nervous? Yeah, I would imagine it's just going to slow things down even more from a pessimistic opinion

standpoint. I can't see, I think it's mostly to save face, both with the public and with the public and with the government at large. Like, okay, we have a lot of things that went wrong. How do we start accounting for these things and explaining what's going on? They have the list. They went through at this meeting a list of the main schedule delay causes for James Webb and the estimated amount of time that it set back on the schedule,

that each one of those costs. But, yeah, I can't see it actually being all that benefit. in the long run. I understand like the desire to do it. I get the mindset of like, well, we have to show that we're responding in some way. We can't just be like,

well, it's late, oh, year, like they'll get to it when they get to it. You can't obviously do that politically. But yeah, it's just,

I don't know, it's one of those things that makes me like, well, and there was like, there was some report that came out way back in like 2011 that was like, it was like foreshadowing the trouble that JWST was going to get into. And it was like,

listen, if you want to get ahead of this, this, here's some things you can do, you know, and they had some ideas of putting NASA in more places. And they just, like NASA came out and said, hey, great report. We totally agree. And then they did nothing about it. And then. And so I wonder if that's maybe trying to get ahead of something like that, right? Because you want to, like you said, just save face, right? So if, if it starts to fall apart again, at least they can catch it like as soon as it happens and they can come forward and say, we saw it because we're responsible, you know, like that seems to be kind of what

they want to do. Yeah, hopefully. And some of the things that have involved delays on missions in the past have been just communication failures. You know, somebody didn't talk to someone else or didn't pass along the right information or somebody wasn't listening to somebody else. So maybe having more people in the loop will help prevent those kind of errors. But I do think it will still sold things down. It's a good question from the Discord. I wonder if they did the same thing when the, because the same company. So the lunar module for Apollo was was Grumman as well, right? I wonder how hands-on NASA was back then.

I don't really have an answer for it. I'm just going to say that question came up. I'm not sure either. I wonder how many people they put in North of Grumman when Zuma went missing. Just kidding. We're not going to bring that one up again. Tinfoil hats come out?

Okay. Okay, so I have a question now. And this, and maybe this may not be the recent cause of these issues, but I wonder if it's perpetuating. it. We still don't have a NASA administrator or a deputy administrator. I wonder how much of these inefficiencies or, you know, just problems in general were allowed to cascade more and more over the next, over the last, you know, year and a half, knowing that there was no administrator. I don't know if you guys have any opinions on that. I know, I know Anthony has a strong

opinion on what usefulness a NASA administrator has, but I'd love to hear me. Yeah, my only opinion was going to be that there's not going to be a Jim Bridenstein space telescope because I don't know that there's going to be a Jim Bridenstein. Yeah, I don't think that it would have a huge effect just because the administrator on high is so removed from everything going on at like the subcontractor and contractor levels. So it's probably not a huge effect here. Yeah, yeah. I was just wonder, because like, I know that maybe an administrator himself or herself

doesn't necessarily like directly accomplish much. but like if if the person beneath the administrator doesn't have the manager they can kind of do whatever they want so they kind of slip a little bit of what maybe they probably meander on their own agenda away from the core nascical and then the people below that do the same thing and the people below that it cascades down a little bit right like lack of leadership is is it is measurable I think but I just don't know how much this specific project right yeah I'm not sure to ponder something to tinker with in the brain Why do planetary missions go right?

Yeah, what's the deal with that? What's the special sauce? Can you give us some tips on in case Jake or I develop a very large scale, hundreds of million dollar space project, how to keep it on track? Like I said, it's just a lot of heritage, a lot of reusability. They tend to ping the same subcontractors over and over again for the same things. Like ASU, for example, we are known for building thermal emission spectrometers. And we've built basically every thermal emission spectrometer that's gone to Mars and beyond.

We've got one on the Europa Klipper mission. We've got one on the United Arab Emirates Hope Mission to Mars. We have one on Osiris Rex. We've sent all of the test instruments that have gone to Mars so far. So it's like a default. People come here like, well, you guys know how to build these. So just build us one. And the general technology behind it doesn't really change all that much.

Same thing goes for cameras. There's generally like two companies that build most of the cameras that go up on NASA missions. and they've done it many times before. And it's not anything groundbreaking or innovative in terms of a lot of that technology. So there's not much to go wrong. They can just say, well, like if you take JunoCam, for example, JunoCam is basically like a repackaged version of the Mars descent imager with some more radiation shielding. So it's something that we knew was already going to work.

And it has no moving parts that helps a lot, too, if you have stuff without moving parts. parts. So not having a giant sunshade really helps you keep the cost down. So how do you think that affects things when we're getting into missions that are going to be a lot more boundary pushing, like having, you know, a small drone on Mars, having a drone on Titan? There's a lot of like, I think we're getting to like the next era of like, oh, here's the new form factor for exploration vehicles for the next decade, two decades, that kind of thing. Because it was like, even in the Mars case, all of our Mars entries have been. the same format of the same kind of back shell, same kind of heat shield.

Skycrain was the first one that was, you know, significantly outside of that. But the next, I would say, 2020s and 2030s are going to be a new era of those kind of vehicles. So how do you think that carries over? That's when we might start to see more scheduled delays and cost overruns. And we're looking at stuff that hasn't been tested. That part of this might be mitigated by the move towards small satellite technology. So we're trying to move away from putting all our eggs in one basket again, which is really great. And if you have stuff that is, instead of putting like 10 instruments on one spacecraft and staying it out there,

if you can send 10 smaller spacecraft that all have separate instruments on them, then if you lose one of them, you don't lose the entire mission. And it has a lot, if you're building smaller missions, it gives you lower development costs. It hopefully gives you lower operational costs because it's not so complicated. And things like your R&D would be cheaper as well. So I think moving to more streamlined missions will help us in the long run. But that also comes with unproven technology. The usefulness of things like small sat and kubesat sized sensors and instruments of various kinds. We're just now proving them in Earth orbit.

we haven't sent any beyond Earth orbit so far. There's some that are supposed to go up on the SLS launch to the moon. Marco coming up too. Yep, and Marco. So that will be exciting. So stoked for that. Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, even before the whole like, you know, CubeSat sort of fad that's going on right now, planetary has kind of benefited already from just a much faster cadence of iteration, Like how many large-scale observatories have we had in space? Like you can count them on like one hand, right? And then think of how many planetary missions we've had. It's dozens and dozens, right? So I guess the kind of benefit from that.

One of the things I kind of think about, and I'm going to maybe we'll draw this over to compare it to like the human exploration. But planetary and astrophysics benefit from the Decatal survey, which is, you know, kind of a founding document. It's sort of a guidepost that kind of, it focuses your requirements to a point where deciding what you need to do is very quick and very clear and straightforward so that, you know, when you go to make the next mission, you're like, well, this is what we're going to do

because we've already made that decision. Human exploration doesn't have that. So do you think that the Decatal Survey plays a role in speeding up these things? and maybe just in the astrophysics case, it's kind of just the R&D that's holding it back from that. That was a terrible way to word that question. No, no, I think I get what you're asking. So I think that it is really beneficial

because it gets people thinking about what they could do really far in advance. We know generally every year, if you're a person like me who has to write proposals to NASA for funding, you know, oh, this particular program is probably going to have their call around February and your proposals will be due in August or something like that. But you know what they're going to be and you know what you want to propose because you can look at the Decado survey and see, well, NASA's only interested in these five things for this

particular type of mission. So if I propose something else, it's not going to get funded. And I need to answer these specific science questions that they've already laid out. So you can sit down and start picking your instruments and forming your team before that call ever goes out, which is generally what happens. on the human side, I feel like there's not a lot of focus. And I never really thought about the fact that maybe part of that comes from not having a Decatal survey. That's my secret dream is that we make a human exploration.

That's been a 2018 campaign. I think his whole year is going to be spent on this. Maybe we should bring you to the Space Studies Board. So that was a lot of what we were discussing at this meeting in D.C. was preparing for the next Decatal survey because a lot of the programs are about to come up for renewal. And there was discussion about right now astrophysics and astronomy is up first and then planetary science. But so much of what could be in astronomy and astrophysics to Cato hinges on whether or not James Webb is successful. So there was a lot of talk of, well, should we switch the deadlines so that we actually do planetary science first because they kind of already know what they want to do.

And that gives us a couple more years of buffer time to figure out what's going to happen with James Webb. and there were supporters on both sides, both for yes, we should delay it or no, we should stick to the schedule the way it is. I kind of felt like switching them made sense personally, but I could also see just having a version where you say, if James Webb is successful, do these things, if it's not, here are the other things that we could do.

And then you just, at least you have it written up as your backup plan. Is that the first time that this has ever happened where one particular program has, potentially delayed a decadal survey in a way that James Webb could. That seems pretty unique to have the confluence of decadal survey and like, you know, all like crazy altering program that might make crazy discoveries that you might want to investigate. It's like such a weird flowchart to get to this point.

Yeah, as far as I know, I think this has happened. How many have we done? There haven't been that many decadal surveys, period, though. It's probably, yeah, this is like the second. one or something. Yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, second or third for planetary, maybe second for astrophysics. I don't know. It hasn't, it's been kind of a newer thing, right? Yeah. I mean, before, we probably weren't doing enough space missions to justify having a decatal survey for anything. But now that, like you said, we're launching a lot of stuff, especially

in planetary science, it makes sense to have them. There's also a lot of discussion of noticing the demographics of people in the room having the discussions about what to do with the decadal and how not very many of them were early career people. So they thought, well, maybe we should bring in the people that are actually affected by what we put in this because it's going to guide their entire career path. It's like, yeah, that might be a good thing to talk about. That's good that they're seeing that. That's good. Yeah, at least in the subpanel that I was on. It sounds like those discussions didn't happen in the other ones so much. but astronomy and astrophysics, they're at least, they're paying attention to these things. That's good. Yeah, I've been, like, diving into this, like, this Decal Survey stuff,

and it is, it is bonkers how much planning goes into this because, you know, we're looking, the planetary one's not supposed to be up until 20, 23, and they're already, like, kicking it off, like he said, right? So basically, they're 10 years long, not because it's just like, you can set it in the stone, but it kind of takes that long to get some results, interpret them, make some decisions, suggest some changes, get them approved in a consensus format and publish them in a document. It's not a very fast process, which I'm fascinated by the kind of, the whole process is really interesting to me because it's like the way that NASA solicits feedback from non-NASA people. I think it, I find it really fascinating.

I don't know. This is me just nerding out on policy stuff, but I think it's neat how it comes together. So yeah, it was really interesting to kind of see the inside version of it because I've never been involved in this kind of stuff before. So to hear the discussions that they have in planning these things and how much work goes into it. Like you said, you understand why it takes years and years to plan all this stuff. And I'd love to go back again next year and see what decisions they make.

Yeah, no kidding. So you think we should have a human one? What do you think? I think so, yeah. Because it would be good to have some goals for human spaceflight other than we're just going to put some astronauts up on the space station. And then we'll try to figure out something to have them do while they're up there. There are no science goals for human exploration on the books for NASA. And that seems like a humongous oversight.

So what are you going to do? And if you're just saying, well, we're going to have them in Earth orbit and then we're going to build this cis lunar base, which is the new hot thing NASA keeps talking about, You're going to have astronauts on there a couple months at the year. So then we're going to go to Mars. Like, okay, well, what do you want to do there? Like, be more specific. And like, everyone kind of will say, like, well, not everything has to be about science. And I agree.

And maybe the Decatal survey doesn't just have to be about science. Like, I would love just some sort of guiding document that's like, hey, we want to develop this kind of technology. We want to start this much industry or, you know, this kind of industry. And maybe we want to achieve a little bit of science goals on the side. even just having the consensus of the community to come together and put that on the books would be, I think, pretty important. I don't know. Even if they just started with human health stuff.

Like, that could be, I could bang that out tonight if you wanted me to. Stuff that we have to figure out. And you could list, you know, here's the gravity effects that we need to figure out. Let's figure out if we can live at one-six gravity. And those things that they're talking up now on the ISS is like, this is what we're figuring out. the fact that they're not working towards something in the Kale survey format, you know, it seems so apt for that for these health issues that we're focusing on. I don't know.

Jake's winning me over to his grand theory here. They do have a technology roadmap, but the technology actually falls under a separate categories. There's like the Science Mission Directorate, there's the Human Exploration Directorate, and then there's science or the technology mission directorate. So all of them are separated from each other. I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. But, yeah, NASA has a list of something like 14 different areas that they want more technology developed in.

And that's put it out there. And then when certain proposal calls come up for different types of technology, there is a program that calls for, like, human health studies. But there's not a specific goal. Like, there's no long-term goal other than what we're going to study how astronauts can survive in space. what is it going to be like for them to live in space long term? But it's focused on technology-type studies, not a science goal, really. Were there any non-James Webb topics?

Unless you had something else on James Webb. I was going to take it off the hot seat, Jake. Well, I was going to go down a path of talking about competitive missions and how they affect it. You think that's like that? Go for it. Yeah. So Planetary does that.

missions in their discovery and the new frontiers class. How much does that play a role in, you know, driving the schedule and driving the budget success, call it that, I guess. That's maybe a question maybe you can answer. I would say that it plays a big role because you know it's going to be a very competitive environment. And it's not as big of a deal schedule-wise for Mars,

because we're very lucky in that the launch windows open every two years. But for other targets, if you miss your launch window, you might not be able to launch for a decade. So if you're trying to do something other than the Earth or the moon, you really, really are motivated to try to stay on schedule. And you have things like they'll rank different instruments to say, okay, these are the instruments on board, that if they're working, but this other one is not,

we'll just scrap this other ones so that we can launch the rest of it because it's not considered mission critical. Part of Curiosity's big delay was from the SAM instrument and that had been, it was not ready for the original 2009 launch and that had been dubbed

one of the mission critical instruments so they were not willing to launch the mission without it. But if you have something that's not considered critical, you can just descope it and hope that you fly that instrument again on a later mission. Yeah.

I think it probably filters up to the top the good stuff right at the beginning too, right? Because like if you don't have your mission planned out well and have the things kind of enumerated probably, like all the risks enumerated properly in your proposal, then you're less likely to get selected in the first place. So, you know, that competitive nature should bring the the least risky highest reward kind of proposals forward, right? Yeah, I think so. What if we had competitive missions? Oh, go ahead. Yeah, what if we had competitive missions for human. What do we take it a step further, right? Take your decadal survey. No, but just like, imagine just

like, you know, NASA could build like this architecture, like this infrastructure, like, okay, we have astronauts, we have, uh, uh, some sort of crew transport. We have a hab and a lab. What do you want to do? And then like these like PIs would come forward and like, well, I need three astronauts and they're going to go up there for blah, blah, blah, time and they're going to do this and this and this and this. And these are the, that would be amazing. I'm in my own little fantastical human decatal survey have in here. I was going to ask how the benefits there of the competitive side creates this better competition, creates programs that are on budget, on schedule for the large majority, overwhelmingly large majority. We're at a point now where there's these two discovery missions that they're

working on finalizing between Dragonfly and Caesar, where there's like some, I don't know how legit these rumors are, but there's a lot of rumors about like maybe they'll pick two. And I'm I'm wondering, you know, if the confidence level is really high that they know these programs tend to be on budget, and even in the case of Osiris Rex, they're like way under budget. They're like, oh, we've got all this extra money. We need to figure out what to do with it. It just seems like such a good cycle there where it opens up these kind of opportunities that a rumor that there are going to be two discovery missions is even plausible because they

know, like, we can plan on this budget. The effects of that, kind of the way Jake was talking about, like the trickle-down effects of not having leadership, the trickle-up effects of these missions just coming in on budget on time, creates more opportunities because you're just getting better at being able to plan. And that's kind of the inverse of this James Webb situation, where W-First is now under fire because, for one, the funding isn't going to free up until another two or three years down the line, but also, like, not a super great track record of telescopes going great for NASA. the first time around.

You know, it's like, only got a sample size of two, but those two didn't go super great on the first attempt there. Yeah, I think it helps too for the competed missions

that we know what the cost cap is pretty much every year. So there's not a lot of guesswork. Like, okay, I need to make my mission come in for new frontiers. It has to be under a billion dollars.

What do I need to do to keep it under that cost cap? And you can do all kinds of simulations. to figure out the cost of your instruments, the cost of your, the use of your time on the deep space network, the cost of your operations, all those things. So you can, and you can draw off of heritage from previous missions. That's usually what happens. They'll say, well, we want to send this mission to Titan, so we're going to draw off of numbers that we know from Cassini operations.

Right, right. So as long as you've done something before, it makes a lot easier. But something like James Webb, a lot of this we've never done before. And so there's not a lot of precedent to go off of. Yeah, yeah. You know, I was talking to, this kind of goes to what you're saying, Anthony. At LPSC, they had the poster war between the two new frontiers candidates. So they had Caesar down on the one side and then a dragonfly on the one and talk to them.

And I was like, I thought it was pretty funny that they put you guys next to each other. And they said, well, you know, we think the other team is all. Both teams said that they're like, the other team is awesome. and they have a wicked proposal. And, you know, if NASA picks one of us, it's not because the other one isn't a good mission. It's because that's where they want to go. If they want to go to Titan, they're going to pick Dragonfly.

If they want to go back to 67P, they're going to pick Caesar, right? So that speaks to kind of how these teams have it together. Like they have good, solid proposals. The teams are good. The people are good. The details are worked out. The risks are understood. so you don't have that risk of a bad mission overrunning

or a difficult mission kind of overrunning your time, right? Yeah. Were there any non-James Webb things that you picked up from the meeting that were interesting or of note or worth talking about? I'm sure there was a million, but anything that comes to mind immediately? They did note that three other astronomy missions that are in the books right now. So Tess, I-XPE and Gusto are all on track to stay within the budget for 2019,

which is great. And there's no danger of those being canceled right now. I mean, tests is happening really soon. Yeah, it's been a couple weeks, isn't it? Yeah, like, it's imminent. I don't think anything's going to happen to it at this point. We hope. Yeah.

Yeah. That's pretty much the only other thing we've really talked about. about it is pretty much the James Webb show most of the time. And they did say that they have a 70% confidence for the newly delayed launch date, which they announced as May 2020. NASA said we'd like it to be better than 70%. But I feel like that was at least a very honest admission there. They aren't 100% sure that they're going to make this next delay date. And that's where it causes problems for the Decado survey.

Because if it's supposed to come out in 2020 for astronomy and astrophysics and you haven't even launched James Webb yet. James Webb yet, what are you going to do? Yeah, yeah. How much effect would that actually have, though? Because even if you get it off, like, even if it made the non-delayed date, like even if it launched in June 2019, like how many actual results? Like, how many published papers are we actually going to get? Because the Decatal survey is supposed to come up by 2020. It's mostly written, you know, already by the time this one launches.

So like, is it just a matter of yes, it got up and deployed or it didn't? Or are they actually waiting for scientific observations to inform their changes, right? That's my question. I think the concern is just whether or not it's successful. Because if it goes up and everything deploys according to plan, then obviously a lot of the the focus of the Decatural survey will be on things that you should do with James. Web. If that asset isn't there, that frees up a lot of time and money theoretically that you could be doing or you could be diverting to something else. So I think that the concern is we don't want to write too much focusing on James Webb and then not have it be successful.

And then we have to either go back to the drawing board and do, I don't know what they would do, would they do like Decatural Survey 2.0 or would they just kind of say, well, ignore the whole. James Webb section and only focus on the rest of it. I'm not really sure what their plan would be there. Oh, that makes me not feel good. The plan is not like, what should we do with the time after it of like, what if it doesn't work? And we have to completely rethink everything is just, this mission is just giving me heart palpitations. This is awful. Yeah, I think we all really, really, really hope that it's going to work. Yeah, I stress out every time I think about it. They're already seen that though, right? So But I was looking at the meat pag, the meeting slides for the Mars exploration program analysis group. And they had, JWST is supposed to have one of their early campaigns.

It's actually a Mars observation campaign. So as Mars kind of comes up to the side of Earth and then goes away on the other side, you can still get a shot of it with the sunshade in the right direction. And they had like four observation windows. So it was like coming and going for two cycles. And they already had to cross the first one off on the slide because of the delay. And I was like, oh, no. So that's just Mars.

I mean, I can't imagine the entire astrophysics decadal survey. Yeah. Hmm. Okay. So you're closer to this decadal survey stuff than I am or Anthony is, I'm sure. I seem to love it. Like I love the decadal survey, and I think it's a great document. But what are the gaps with it?

Like what could be improved on it or what is really kind of the, you know, the dark side of the decadal survey? What hurts exploration with it? Tough question, maybe. Yeah. I feel like maybe one of the only downsides is that you're kind of locking things in for the next 10 years. And so there's not a lot of room for flexibility if you made some new massive discovery where maybe next year for some reason we discover that Colisto is super interesting. We really want to go to Colisto, but it happens to not be in the Decado survey.

What do we do there? Do we make some kind of exception and just say, okay, we've made this discovery? so we should focus on things like this. I feel like it also is maybe limiting in terms of technological breakthroughs that could happen in that time span. You know, what kind of things could we get that will improve the things that we can do over the next 10 years? And I can't remember which one of you mentioned it.

One of you said earlier on something about the commercial sector. And this came up a lot in the D.C. meeting, too, about how, kind of in passing, every once in a lot, be like, yeah, we really need to talk to our commercial partners. And then there would be any further discussion than that. So I think specifically the role of commercial partners should be considered as we're moving into this next Decadal survey, especially at the very least in terms of the Earth observing program because we have private Earth observing companies now, like Planet and Digital Globe and Earthcast. And I feel like their assets are not being fully.

leverage, at least in the scientific community, as I've learned from trying to get scientists to learn to pay for data to do science. It's a little bit tricky when they're used to getting data for free. But the difference in the data is substantial. It's higher temporal resolution, so they're taking images more frequently. It's higher spatial resolution. So it's unlocking a lot of ability over something like Lansat that is kind of tried and true. It's always been there.

And that's what scientists are used to working with. But if we can start getting them to think about these new assets, okay, what could you do with this either on its own or complimentary to LAMSAT? You know, we need more productive discussions than just saying, oh, we should talk to industry. Like, okay, you need to listen to what industry could bring to the table and see how it can help. You know, I'm sure we're going to talk about SLS later. But things like that, like, okay, we have stuff like SpaceX, bringing down the cost of. of launches. So what could other commercial sectors do to help bring down the cost of other things for space exploration? It's also a good time to figure that out because I had a thought the other day

that like planet isn't named Earth. Yeah, and that was intentional. It's a hundred percent chance that they're going to launch some imaging satellites to Mars or somewhere else in the future. So if we can figure out how to take advantage of that now, it won't be as hard of a change when somebody's got some equipment operating elsewhere. Do you think that if planet launches and imaging constellation to the moon that they're going to ruffle a lot of IAU feathers. I already asked them. I was like, can you send like a constellation to Mars? But I need to find a bird that is appropriate because like their constellation on Earth are called doves. I thought, oh, Mars we could call them cardinals, but cardinals are not birds

that travel in in flocks or packs, apparently. I learned from one of my friends. You're way down this rabbit hole. Yeah, you're like, I was. I wanted something really appropriate. And one of my friends who's, or Nina Lanzah, who has been on the Wee Martians podcast, her husband is an avid birder. And so I asked him what the appropriate bird might be. And he said, oh, well, brightly colored birds tend to be solitary animals, which I had no idea about before.

So I couldn't find a bright red bird that travels in flocks to use for Mars. But maybe we'll come up for something. Just look around in the desert and figure out what flocks in the desert and then just pick that. That's true. There's got to be something out here. Vultures, I guess. I don't know. Vultures.

Sounds a little evil. I was going to say you could do like Phoenix, but the plural of that, it would just be too complicated, I think, for everyone. That one's also taken. Yeah, I like Adam on Discord says flamingos, because they're pink. Yeah.

That's close enough for me. If you can come up with an acronym that comes out to be flamingo, like you're hired to work on this mission. There's his night. There's probably like a department at NASA for back. acronyms too. So you'd probably be able to get a job there. Yeah, I'm not going to try. Not now. Yeah, that'd be really cool. Yeah. And I, you know, I think about the commercial stuff, even just launch costs themselves, which is like one of the most like simple and elegant goals of

of what's been happening to the space industry on like a discovery class mission where the, you know, the budget is only, what is it, like 160 million or 200 million, whatever it is. It's low, right? Yeah, just for the launch part. Yeah. So if you imagine like changing the launch costs from whatever, you know, 150 to 200 million for the old style to getting it down to 100 million, that's you make a couple of savings like that. You can actually squeeze in another discovery mission somewhere. Like it's got a huge implication for if we can, if we can leverage it right, you know? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. The more science the better.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So last topic, maybe the SLS. You want to dive into that? Any other? Yeah, you brought it up. We've talked about what causes delays. So I don't think it's R&D on the SLS side. A lot of heritage work there, right? That's supposed to save us some time. Yeah.

Is it lack of Decatal survey or is it just politics? I guess do you want to open that question up? I feel like SLS has been definitely more. I'm trying to think of what the best words. to use is. It's been plagued with more problems of varying degrees in terms of, like you said, it's not just, oh, this is hard because it's new technology. You know, there were issues with some of the welding on the liquid oxygen tanks. They had some tower misalignment issues. You know, those are things that probably should have been picked up in the process of doing them.

There were a lot of problems on the European side with their service module. That actually led to a significant amount of the delay, which I'm sure a lot of people would chime in and start ragging on international collaboration because some people think that it makes things more expensive. I do think that it makes things more expensive and slower in the long run, but I also think spaces for everybody and we should work together. So a little torn there. And they ran into a lot of operational cost overruns after the assembly facility got hit

by a tornado at one point. So even though it didn't damage any of the hardware really for SLS, the operations got shut down and affected for quite a while. So there have just been like a lot of small problems adding up and adding up. And now the question has been coming up lately. Well, we know Falcon Heavy was successful. So do we even need to keep developing SLS? And they are different categories of launchers.

SLS can launch about twice as much theoretically. in a single launch mass-wise compared to Falcon Heavy, but you're looking at a billion-dollar price tag per launch, which is quite significant chunk of the NASA budget, compared to about $90 million for Falcon Heavy. So you could still launch two Falcon Heavys, have the equivalent amount of mass get into orbit, and it still costs you a fraction of a single SLS launch.

You can use all that extra money to buy down the risk of in-orbit assembly, right? Yeah, exactly. So unless you have a reason, like you have something that is too large, like you just physically need that amount of space. I think it's what like nine school buses worth of space that you could launch in the SLS. If you can assemble it in orbit, then just launch it with the smaller launchers, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, and a lot of people love to rag on SLS, and I have huge criticism to SLS, but I'm even, even me, like, I'm one of the, the few people that can muster up an ounce of support for it.

But it's crazy. That's because I'm not paying for it. Yeah. Yeah. Canada. But I think it's interesting because like it's almost like its own cost overruns have, have outdated it in a way where the reason for it being has become outdated, right? Like that's it's sort of like aged itself out of existence in a weird.

way. I don't know. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon, but it's so tied up. Similar to the Decatal Survey thing, Tanya was talking about, where it is 10 years the right amount of time, because when SLS was approved, decide which architecture you pick to decide when SLS was actually approved because it's had like nine lives or whatever. But, you know, even this most recent round, Obama administration timeline, it was totally different back then. There was no way to count on the world that we're looking at today. Yeah. And that's that same deal where like 10 years is a long time. We're sitting here 10 years from when that happened, nine years, I guess, and everything is totally different. So it's just like, I feel like that piece is completely

forgotten in the debate a lot of times that the decisions were made in a different era. And yes, you know, if we were deciding today, the decision would be different. But, you know, we got here through a different world than we are in now. And obviously that leads to like, okay, but what is the right path now? Sunk cost fallacy, et cetera, et cetera. But I do feel like people forget that part of it, that NASA was different, launch industry was different, different, the mission was different. There's just like, it's not apples and oranges, but it's pretty close to, you know, polar opposites. What a Decadal survey have helped that?

Probably. because we have a mission still. You'd have an end goal for it at the very least, but that still wouldn't have gotten around SLS development versus Falcon Heavy development. If you were still developing SLS and it still was delayed even with a Decadal survey, and then in the same time span,

you have these commercial companies going from, like at the time that you had the Obama-era SLS approval, commercial launchers were still not really a thing. Yeah, SpaceX had docked with the ISS. I think that had happened already at that point, right? That's like 2011 or something. Okay, so right around the same time. So that's at the point where commercial space launchers

are actually starting to gain some ground, but not flight-proven really. And now, you know, SpaceX lands boosters every other week, it seems like. So we need to be able to be flexible enough to adapt to those kind of innovations. And, you know, I love NASA, you know, but they're not, they're a government entity, so they're not able to do things rapidly. No.

And that's not a great thing when you're doing stuff that's based in technology, which is changing very rapidly on the private side. So I don't have the answer to how do we address that, but we should really be thinking about it. And yeah, maybe the answer is to not rely so much on a 10-year-old. year plan for everything, maybe make it five years or just have signed up, sort of a general roadmap of these are our goals for NASA, but, you know, they're not set in stone. We can do other things if something interesting comes up or we have some new technology

that comes up. I'm just imagining now a five-year human exploration decatal survey, like a semi-decal hemidicatal, I don't know, but the five years would line up like just like it'd be so annoying offset from presidential elections, I just kind of, that made me chuckle to think about that. That's true. And that's the other big problem. You know, NASA, you can't really fault NASA themselves in a lot of these things just because they're stuck at the whims of politics.

And it makes it really hard to have any long-term goals if it changes with every presidential administration, including having a new NASA administrator. Or right now, not having. having an administrator. Yeah, yeah. So when you're working on projects that require these timelines that are longer than a presidential administration, and then suddenly someone comes in and says, oh, you know, what, we're not going to Mars anymore, or we're not going to do this constellation

program anymore. You know, that screws everything up, and suddenly you're back to the drawing board again. And we have to try to figure out a way to deal with that as well, you know, how do we keep some focus over the long term? I don't know that this is the best analog, but the FBI director has a tenure of so that the president can't pick one that will, you know, obviously it lines up every once in a while, but the idea is that the FBI can still investigate the president without too much of conflict of interest because there's that 10-year term.

So, you know, there's, I know that people have talked about in the past going to a 10-year term for an administrator or something like that. Five-year would be, I guess, sensible as well because you never know who's going to have a four-year term or not. But I don't know. I still think, I'm still on Jake's bandwagon of, Decadal Survey for Human Exploration and set some goalposts for us. Yeah, sounds good. We should write a white paper. We'll write it up.

See, this is a productive podcast. We got something done. We have goals for human exploration. Yeah, we solved a lot of problems. It was a podcast Decadal Survey. Go team. And someone came up with the Flamingo acronym. Oh, yeah.

I got to find it. Where is it? Lucas flying around Mars imaging and geography observatory crushed it's perfect I guess that's the title of the episode as well let's do it it's actually the title of the episode now it's really long okay so do you want to move into emails or picks what do you want to do first what's our format I don't know did we get any emails that you wanted to call out some Chris Hadfield

related thing. Yeah, so Gillian sent us an email and he recommended a podcast called Desert Island Discs, which I've never heard of. It's like a BBC production

and they like interview someone who's like interesting and then they get them to pick like the music they would have on them if they were stranded on a desert island. And so the episode that Julian recommended was an interview with Chris Hadfield.

And so it was like Chris Hadfield talking about fighter jets and space and then he would like swing into like his music and I love his sense of music like his taste of music because it's like it's like very fokey and very rock and like just enough Canadian that you feel like really connected to it like it was a really good interview so thank you Julian for for saying that out to me everyone seemed to take you up Anthony on your your challenge of of email addresses because so so Tanya our email address, you can email literally anything at off nominal.

dot space and it'll get to us. And so, we mentioned that in the last podcast. And everyone was testing. They were testing that feature out to see you. Emojis work. Oh, geez work. Really? Yeah, we think that Daniel wins the award for the best one because he literally just sent us the rocket emoji at off nominal.comal. That's pretty good. The email got to us. I had no idea. You can email with emojis. That's amazing. I got to really consider my entire email strategy from here on out. Yes.

Like, even in my outlook, it showed up. Like, it was literally like rocket at Off Nautilat space. It was awesome. So that was good. We also got a lot. We got another comment about these Kansas salt mines. Have you ever heard of this, Tanya? There's these salt mines in Kansas that are apparently you can go like spulunking through them. And I don't remember that many facts about them, but they're like incredibly deep

salt mines. And apparently we got to go out to Kansas to go to the Cosma. sphere, as Jake would call it. It's the Cosmodrome. And go to these salt mines. So if you're ever in Kansas, I would recommend it, apparently. I'm always in Kansas, you know, every other month. We're getting a lot of pressure to go to Kansas. I don't know what it is.

A big follower ship in Kansas. And then I also want to just shout out one last email from Kieran, who's in our Discord. I don't think he's there today because he's in Ireland and it's like the middle of the night there. But he sent us, literally sent us, a

but text in Greek. But there was somebody else on the email thread. Like it wasn't just to us. Let me pull it up. Did you, do you know what I'm talking about? Oh yeah. It was like a bunch of random,

a bunch of random people in the CC. It was like the circle feedback. I don't know. That's what it was. Support. He like hit some random address book stuff. I don't know. Everyone is very happy that I said Kieran because they were wondering how to

pronounce it. It would like, I straight up, I have no idea. That's how you pronounce it, by the way. I knew a girl who was Irish. Our name was Kira, and it was spelled the same. So I'm taking a guess there. But, yeah, hopefully that's right. Yeah, picks.

You want to go first, Anthony? Or? We briefly told Tanya about this. We, like, surprised her. I don't know if you have a space pick. There's no pressure to have a space pick. Oh, no. I forgot that I was supposed to have something.

It doesn't matter. You don't have to worry about it. You can think of it and then plug it at the end if you want. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to, so here, I got my foreshadowing. Just a callback.

Great Lakes, brewing company. Okay. My wife and I have had a very stressful couple of weeks. So we were looking for things to chill out, just take the mind off stuff. We had not watched Blue Planet 2. Yeah. This is like the follow up to the BBC show. I think it's a BBC, right?

Yeah. Sounds right. It is the best. It's amazing. Specifically, this sounds like a weird pick for a space podcast. Episode two is an episode about The Deep, and things get so weird in this episode. Because it's just like they get into their little sub. They descend thousands of feet down to the bottom of the ocean.

And the life forms that are down there are just incredibly strange. There was like these little shrimps that live their entire. entire lives inside of a sponge. Like, they get sucked into this sponge when they're just larvae, and then they grow there, and then they're stuck in there because they're too big to get out. But it's like a symbiotic relationship. Whatever. The whole time I was just thinking about this.

I mean, they mentioned this at the end of the episode, much to my pleasure. The whole time I was saying to my wife, if life is this freaking weird on Earth, like, in earthly environments, imagine what is out there in, these great lakes of Titan because we had just done the off-nominal show about dragonfly and Titan seas and all this stuff. And the weirdest thing about this whole show, which is somewhat related, towards the end, they show these brine lakes that are at the bottom of the ocean. Have you ever heard of these things? No. Tani's like, yeah, I'm smarter than both of you. Plus a million. Sorry, Jay.

No problem, Dr. Harrison. So I had not encountered these before, but they're like these incredibly concentrated saltwater lakes that pull up at the bottom of the ocean. And so it just straight up looks like a lake at the bottom of the ocean. It's so, it's so creepy. I'll send you some photos of this. But it's like also really concentrated with methane. And there are life forms around it, bacteria and otherwise, that are, they're like chemosynthetic or whatever. chemosynthesis, like photosynthesis, but with methane and other hydrocarbons.

And they just produce energy out of methane. So my mind is just like, that's what's on Titan. I was like, Titan has got to be so weird. So I would recommend the entire Blue Planet 2 series, but the deep will just make you like think about aliens the whole time and how weird they're going to look because Earth is so freaking weird. So I'm just going to have to watch that tonight, I guess. Yeah.

It's a great series. Yeah, I wish I had time for TV. You ever have that feeling? We would watch one a night, like, before going to sleep, nice and relaxing, beautiful ocean vistas. That one freaked my wife out a little bit, especially that the Brian Sea thing, because there were like these little eels at the bottom of the ocean

that would swim into it, and then they would go into toxic shock because it's like, I don't know, too concentrate or something, and they would have like these crazy convulsions. It was creepy. Jeez. I would recommend it. Poor little guys.

No, he made it. I made it minute. Poor little eels. Okay. So I have a pick. I've been doing a lot of studying on Mars weather stuff. I'm trying to get familiar with climate and atmospheric stuff because it is woefully lacking

in what limited Mars knowledge I have in my brain. And so, Tanya, this is a pick that will be very close to you, I'm sure, but this is just the weather report for the the Mars, the color imager. So I was on an MRO.

It's at the Malin website. And it's just got, what they do is they take like a full picture of Mars with the, I think it's, I'm going to say the wrong thing now, but they can, the right spectra to image the clouds. So they can see the clouds over the surface of Mars.

And they take a picture of the whole planet every day and they make this movie every week of the planet spinning. And you can see the cloud system. and the storms and stuff moving around the planet. And it's basically just a Mars weather report that comes out every week. And it's awesome. Like it's so cool because there's like this little like animated spinning thing. And they have like a little write-up that says like,

well, there were some storms in the Southern Highlands today. And we had a localized dust storm over Hellas Crater and da-da-da-da-da. And it's really neat to see. And you can just go back and read all of these. They have like them all laid out and you can download the movie and everything. So it's a pretty interesting little tidbit of Mars weather stuff. That's what I got. That's pretty cool.

So I have one for you guys. I was thinking of something that I just saw the other day, actually. So tying back to Earth and Planet Labs, they just released some images around the beginning of April that are really cool, oblique views of the Earth. You guys are nodding, so I assume you saw these. Yeah, yeah. They're very cool. So Planet has basically three different types of satellites in orbit.

They've got some rapid-eye satellites that they essentially bought from another company that they bought out. They have their dove kubats, which are kind of what they're most known for. But they also have a handful of sky-sat high-resolution satellites, thanks to buying out skybox imaging from Google, who had themselves bought out Terabella. So it's like leading a bunch of acquisitions of Earth-observing companies. But now Planet has these sky stats, and they just launched a couple more very recently. And these are 70 to 80 centimeter pixel resolution images. So they're pretty high resolution.

And they've got some really awesome views of volcanoes and city skylines and mountains to really give you a perspective view of, you know, usually we're just looking at stuff top down, like flat on when you're looking at satellite images. So you don't really get a sense of perspective. And these images do a really amazing job of giving you perspective. Like they don't even look real because I look at satellite images every day for work, but I very rarely look at anything from an oblique angle. And so even to me, they're really trippy.

So, yeah, if you Google, like one of the news articles for it, satellite images from highly oblique angles are pretty mind-blowing. And they've got a collection of the images there with a little write-up about it. So definitely check them out because they're really cool. And if you want more awesome planet images of Earth, you can actually download their Chrome extension if you use Chrome. So that anytime you open up a new browser window, it pulls in a random planet image. And I've spent a lot of time saying there's hitting a refresh on like not a real website,

just the browser extension. Like what image is going to come up next? So it's really cool. You might also waste a lot of time. But it's a cool way to see awesome images of Earth. They did one about a year ago of they figured out that they had, I think this was planet. Correct me if I'm wrong. They had realized that one of their satellites was going to be positioned well for a Soyuz launch.

And they were able to figure out how to pan with it correctly to see it launch a couple of, I don't know, a couple of frames of it. But that was another one where they're like, oh, what have we pointed these things a little bit sideways? It would be really cool. Yeah, they managed to image like a launch of some of their other kubats with their kubats that were in orbit. They made a crazy video of it. Like that was really, really cool. Yeah, the Soyuz one is like incredible because it's if you've ever like if you I know that the rocket trajectories are a little confusing if you're not into like rockets but like if you ever need to picture exactly what a rocket trajectory looks like you can see it like a little bit up and then tilting over and like oh it's perfect it's awesome yeah oh look at the planet thing was well timed too because I there was a couple of good satellite passes over Philly recently and one of them was a KH 11 hexagon spy set that was launching. It was actually the last, it was the launch that held up Falcon 1 at Vandenberg.

Oh, that last Titan launch? Yeah. And it was coming over Philly like a really good pass a week or two ago or something. I went out to see it and then got sucked down some rabbit holes about that program. And there was some whole drama about somebody leaked one of the images that was taken by it in like the 80s of a Russian, a Soviet at the time carrier. and it was right before I saw these planet images and it was one of those oblique image shots but from like 30 years ago of this carrier

and I was like oh wow it's like a pretty good photo and then I saw these planet ones and I'm like these things are in like a loaf of bread taking these photos of Earth it's incredible just to think about the size of these things I guess these ones are the larger ones like they're so tiny I think Skybox ones are the size of a dish dishwasher

I think that's the comparison of use yeah yeah still though incredible Yeah, the future is now. Planet's pretty cool. Adam's got the link to that article in the Discord so I can see. That's like Dubai?

It's like Dubai or something. Yeah, I think that's Dubai. Yeah, who else would build something like that? Come on. Tanya, where can people find you on the internet? Because they obviously should find you on the internet. Everywhere. Yeah.

You are everywhere. That's not a joke. So I went into a meeting at work the other day, and I walked into the room and some student looked at me and was like, you're Tanya from Twitter. And one of the professors in the room was like, does that happen a lot? And I laughed.

And I was like, yeah, it does. So I'm mostly on Twitter, Tanya of Mars, Tanya with an A. I also have a public Facebook page, but I neglected it a lot.

But if I had more followers on Facebook, I would be more inclined to use it just saying. That's a story of Facebook. To call out for more followers on Facebook. Yeah. I probably won't use the Facebook page very much. So, like, you can just use Twitter because I think it's way more awesome anyway. I probably won't keep up the Facebook page.

It'll just die a slow death. But, yeah, you can find me on Twitter. I'm very active talking about mostly Mars, but also other cool space things and anything that gets me really excited, like SpaceX and Planet, all that cool stuff. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, we'll put all the links and all the linkies in. in the show notes for sure.

Oh, wait. You can find me on Red Bubble where you can buy the shirt that Jake is wearing right now that none of you in Discord can actually see. I have this awesome eclipse shirt.

So it's the NASA meatball logo, except instead of the blue meatball behind it, it's real data, I'm told, by someone who was involved with making this shirt.

So it's a real corona with all the, what do you call those, the tendrils or whatever? Yeah. Is that from this summers? Yeah, I wore it at the actual eclipse. I got it.

I got it just at the time. The image is from the eclipse. So the image is from the solar dynamics observatory. I had to black out the center part of the sun because it's actually just a whole disc image of the sun. Yeah, but I tried like many different images before I found one that actually worked. And they went through the NASA media creation people and was like, hey, is it okay if I do this? Good that you ask. Yeah, they have a website to do that kind of stuff, which is helpful.

Yeah, I know I bought this on your site and I, red bubble doesn't have great Canadian shipping options. So I sent it to my mailbox over the border. I have a mailbox in Washington. And so I literally picked it up on the way down to Oregon. Oh, nice. So it still had that gross red bubble smell when you first get it, you know? Sour smell. Yeah, that like ink smell or whatever it is.

So I wore it in Oregon with that smell because I wanted to have it on. It's an awesome shirt. for the sacrifice. We'll put that link up, though. And Tanya's got a bunch of other amazing Mars shirts and other space shirts that are definitely worth getting. So I don't have anything else.

So if you guys are good, let's sign off, I guess. All right. Sounds good. Thanks for having me, you guys. Cue the music.