Off-Nominal - 121 - Status: Future

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Mark Panning from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and PI of the Farside Seismic Suite to talk about the Chandrayaan-3 and Luna-25 Moon landings and what we can look forward too from CLPS coming soon.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeLuna-25 crashes into moon after orbit maneuver - SpaceNewsChandrayaan-3: India becomes fourth country to land on the moon - SpaceNewsISRO on X: “Here is how the Lander Imager Camera captured the moon's image just prior to touchdown.”ISRO on X: “Chandrayaan-3 Mission: The image captured by the Landing Imager Camera after the landing. It shows a portion of Chandrayaan-3's landing site. Seen also is a leg and its accompanying shadow. Chandrayaan-3 chose a relatively flat region on the lunar surface”NASA Selects New Science Investigations for Future Moon DeliveriesFollow MarkMark Panning (@markpanning.bsky.social) - BlueskyJPL Science: Mark PanningFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeJake Robins (@jakerobins.com) - BlueskyWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hey, everyone. I hope you know about this episode because Twitter won't load for me and I can't tweet about it. So here we are. It's almost like there's ways for people to subscribe to this on several different methods, whether audio or video, Jake. It's a mystery. If you're just putting in our Twitter feed,

hoping that you can find out when it shows started. Yeah, we need to talk to you about several things, if that's the case. We need to talk to you about that. All right, well, we made it. We got here. I've had a, I've had a fun day. I cut my foot on some glass and I'm not, I'm not enjoying it very much, but, you know. You may be sliding into sepsis at the moment, so we'll see. We'll find out. If I get like really delirious, like halfway through the episode, there could be something up. We'll find out. We have Mark Panning with us today. Mark, welcome to the show.

I'm really excited to have you. I never ever got you on We Martians and I felt real not good about that so this is what we're doing next it it never happened in my my mission's not active on Mars anymore so you know it's yeah yeah you used to work on the inside mission and I just never never got there so I apologize for that but you've got bigger newer better things on the horizon so really excited to talk to you about some moon stuff today because we had a moony week very wow moonish week Jake coming out with bigger better things being the moon over Mars what a tides have turned it's all good it's all good they're all planets man

they're all planets they love them all I I like that you call it a planet I this is I I'll die on that hill too yeah that's a strong position of this podcast I mean you can't do seismology on a rock so you know what do we care what it orbits the planet What I'm talking about. This is what I'm talking about. What are we drinking today? What do you guys got? Anthony, you got anything fun today?

I actually do. Yeah, I got a thing, Jake. I'm making a gin and tonic, but a long story, a friend of mine sent me some gin, which was Matt Stalfer for all the dev nerds out there, if anyone's a Larval fan.

Sent me this ghost bomber gin, which apparently... So, I live in Pennsylvania. has weird liquor laws. Hard to order liquor to any house in Pennsylvania. I guess unless it comes from somewhere else in Pennsylvania, that fits our protectionist racket. And this is from like somewhere, this is out from Pittsburgh.

Apparently there was in 1956 a B-25 bomber that crashed in a river near Pittsburgh and disappeared, per the people reporting this in 1956. So take that with as many grains of salt as you may want to take that with. So, I don't know, ghost bomber. I guess that's like a cool, like, urban situation, urban legend situation out in Pittsburgh. So I'm going to make a ginatonic with this thing. I haven't opened yet. So I don't know what it smells like yet.

Okay. Pretty pumped. Yeah. So thanks Matt. So I actually have a genitonic too. Oh. Mine has no good story. So I was like, I was like, I should look up a moon cocktail.

And I just like Google moon cocktail. And the first thing that popped up was new moon cocktail. And it was the Junentonic. And I just made it. And I asked zero questions. You should have at least made a blue gin and tonic for the upcoming blue moon that is overhyped. Well, it is, I mean, it is blue Bombay or whatever it's called. Okay.

But you made it a green drink, though. Well, so there's lime juice in it quite a bit. A lot. It's that green. There's triple sec in at two. So I don't know. There's no logic here. What do you got, Mark?

Okay. I've got a drink. I'm calling the unfat, I still have to spend the rest of the afternoon writing a proposal, which is actually why I'm growing a proposal beard. And so I still got a full afternoon, so it's basically all the ingredients of my old-fashioned, minus the whiskey, which is a little disappointing. I feel like that puts you in enough of a mood for writing a proposal and stuff. Like that gets you in... Yeah, and I fuse it with smoke, so it's fancy.

You know, like, that's really the important part. I did see that. That was quite the unveil. It was a first pyro on the show. Yeah. It's all about presentation. Even if the drink is kind of, meh. It's a presentation is good.

It's all good. That really is the right drink for a proposal then is what you're saying. You got it. That is exactly it. If it looks good, you should fund it, right? That's it. I was going to make a different. proposal joke, but then you just teed that one up that I had to go for it.

I had a whole thing about how you take the whiskey out and then you get sad and that's in the right frame of mind. But anyway, that's so good. It's all about appearances. That's really good. Oh, wow. Okay, cool. Well, moon stuff happened this week, guys. Yeah. Who watched stuff? Okay, I guess you only got to watch one in real time, right? So that was fun, but I don't know.

But where do we start with that? Opening thoughts from, okay, Mark, maybe you should introduce yourself as to why do we care about your opinion about the moonlighters? Maybe tell us a little bit about what we do. Sure. So, yeah, so hi, I'm Mark Panning. I'm a planetary seismologist, which I think at the time I was hired, there were two professional planetary seismologists in the U.S.

You know, since Insights been around, I think there's probably of the order of 10. But, you know, I like to be able to say, you know, at the time I was hired, I was like, I'm one of the two best planetary seismologists in the country. Yeah, I'm at least top two. Like, I don't want to say I'm number one, but I'm up there. Yeah. I'm up there. So, yeah, so I do seismology on any planet.

You can possibly put a seismometer on. That's basically my goal. And I spent a lot of time working on the NASA Insight mission on Mars, which is why Jake should have had me on Wii Martians, but never did. I'll take it. I'll take it. And these days I'm working on a project we call Farside Seismic Suite. It's one of the NASA Clips payloads. So Clips is commercial lunar payload services.

It's always hard to remember these acronyms. I'm in the wrong line of work with not being able to remember acronyms, but you get the idea. And yeah, so it's Farside, Seismic Suite, and currently scheduled for 2025. We'll be launching on a commercial lander provided by Draper Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they're going to fly us to the moon, and then we'll just sit on their lander. It'll die at the end of the lunar day. but we'll just keep running for at least four months, probably longer, but we're only guaranteed four months of funding.

And, you know, listen for moonquakes. And until this week, I was always telling people that we would be the first seismometer on the moon since the Apollo missions. But that's a total lie now. The lander that just successfully landed the Indian Chandrae 3, does have a seismometer on it. So now I'm going to be the first seismometer since Chanjin 3, which is not as impressive

sounding. Always number 2. Since at least last August. Yeah, it's been a long time. Oh, wow. Yeah, they scooped you, man. They scooped you. Yeah, I'll take it.

You'll be able to maybe use that as some new baseline data, though. I don't know how easy it is to get your hands on Indian science research data, but hey, you never know. Yeah, I have no idea how we're going to get a hold of it. I'm definitely going to try. It's not a, it's one of these little micro-machine silicon sensors, and it's... It's built by micromachines. Maybe. Maybe you have to talk real fast when you're just like. It's like just reading out the info to you really, really fast. It's an audio-based, you know, instead of, we didn't really really.

want to waste the data comms on the actual data. We just thought we'd put an audio feed of some guy narrating really fast. It's great. Does anybody remember the micromachines guy, or is that just like, you know, what age do you have to be to remember the micromachines guy? That feels like our demo. Yeah, there's going to be some diehard micro machine fans tweeting us in about five minutes. And then there's probably a few people too old to remember it.

Like, never was relevant to their life. Yeah. So, yeah, so it's a pretty high frequency sensor, and I'm not sure it's going to see much in the way of moonquakes, but I'm excited to have us. This landed second then, because they could have had some good calibration data with Luna 25 smashing into the moon. That would have been really sad. Some of the best data from the Apollo mission was the Saturn 4B upper stages that crashed him in and made such beautiful seismograms. So I don't know if, I don't know how hard Luna hit. but there will be something else crashing in the moon soon enough.

Well, don't worry. Yeah, don't make the mistake of thinking that Chandran 3 just ended all the failures. Yeah, now we're good at landing on the moon. Like that one, we finally did. Oh, now we figured it out, yeah. Until the 28th crash and then we're like, no, but now we're over it, okay? Yeah, I don't know if you saw, but Jonathan McDowell posted a list of like all 50 attempted soft landings on the moon and and his you know he gave it a score it was gravity 27 earthlings 23 so so you know it's

still hard to land on the moon pretty wild that's that's some serious there you go this is such a a John McDowellican website too I love this website user agent style sheet at work right there I'm going to start distributing custom style sheets for Jonathan McDowell data and just see it when he picks up on it. Yeah, this is here. For the love of God, please put this CSS file on your website. I love this score column too. This is great. You know, this is this a great box score. So yeah, we're really quite quite behind. Well, and it's, when I was looking at this list, I, you know, I realized it, but I didn't

actually put it together that this was the first successful. non-Chinese landers since 1976. That's big. You know, this is, I mean, it also says how, you know, impressive the Chang'i landers have been, you know, that they managed three successful landings in the last decade when nobody else has managed anything for, you know, my lifetime. You know, that's, that's, it says something.

And they nailed it on the first one, right? They didn't even, they've never crashed one. Not that I'm aware of. Yeah. On this list, it was three, four, and five all landed successful. Yeah, because one and two were just orbitors, right? Yeah. Yeah.

The trick is throttleable engines in case anyone was keeping score on that. If he had a column for landers that landed with throttable engines, there would be a pretty good track record of those and not so good with the non-throtolables. And, you know, if you look at it, it also looks like a lot of time it's somebody put in fault protection, but bad fault protection. You know, people put in all these codes to try to say, oh, if something goes wrong, we're going to fix it. But it seems like a lot of times the fix is worse than what they're trying to fix.

Yeah, it really felt like I'm looking at some of the older ones. Like a lot of them, that common theme was like bad sensor data told it to do something bad. You know, like it was just sort of like it just, you know, it's not like something, it's not like we just broke. It's just like they got some interesting data that was, what do you call it, out of family? Yeah. And they didn't know how to handle it, right? That makes the 12-2 alarm fairly impressive.

Like, they got that prioritization right back in the day. So helps you get some people there. Yeah, your fault tolerance was the human brain, right? Your fault handling mechanism was the human brain. So it does pretty well sometimes. Occasionally. Occasionally, occasionally. Yeah, well, uh...

And then there's the other one. We didn't even talk about Luna 25 at all. Yeah. Yeah. I mean... Do you believe any of the conspiracy theories that it never even like made it? Like, wasn't there a whole thing with, um, uh, Scott Tilly and all of his, his tracking friends? Like, they, once it launched, they weren't able to see it like at all.

Like, it was, there was nothing going on after that. So there's a, there's like a theory that it didn't actually make it to the, the lunar orbit and then try land it was just like never ever either was an empty rocket or it failed like immediately after lunch i have not been keeping up on this storyline side of this i i hadn't heard that but those those tracking people they i mean they do amazing stuff i mean we were um you know back in the insight days uh we wanted to see if we could see the when the chinese lander came in you know, because we always looked for signals of anything that either crashed or landed or dropped stuff. And, you know, there were no public releases of where they were going to land.

There were no public releases of when they were going to land. And there are laws that if you're, you know, working with NASA, you can't actually collaborate with the Chinese directly. So we couldn't even ask anybody, you know, because that would count as bilateral collaboration. or some such nonsense like that. Or at least the congressional incident. It would be illegal. So we couldn't, you know, we couldn't do that. But, you know, basically we just-

Outing out into public at each other. Yeah. Right? And basically we just looked at all those, all these, you know, amateur tracker people that, you know, we're tracking the carrier signal from it. And they, you know, they accurately predicted all of the birds that they were doing to make the landing.

And they, you know, said they're going to land here at this time based on the birds they've done. it's a really incredible community. Scott is Canadian, so it's perfect. Like, you can talk to him, you can talk to them. Yeah. It's all good. Yeah, we don't have a great relationship with Chinese either, though.

You've got to remember that. Water under the bridge. It was last year. No, no, he had some tweet that was just like, as a reminder, like, we didn't see any signals, you know, past the alarm. I just pulled it up here. If you would like, can you do a dramatic reading for it? It's like a three part.

I didn't realize how dramatic he was with this three. part, three-part tweet situation. It's the part at the end. Yeah. I've been asked over and over to share LLU.25 data. There is none. And then a couple more tweets. I ask you to consider a humble followers when the last time our community of deep space observers missed a lunar mission.

Further, I extend the idea that researchers of lunar imaging data should perhaps consider a comparison of recent Luna 25 images to existing LRO and other image databases. I love that. Wow. I didn't see that third one. It's not even spicier. That is really. Really good

But why I Hmm Alright Alright Let's go down the rabbit hole Let's go down the rabbit hole Why would they

Why would they Fake a mission And then Screw up a D-Orbit maneuver Or a Like this is the weirdest way To K Fabe

Of failed lunar landing All right Let's do let's do this If you were to fake A lunar mission mark Hypothetically What would you What would you

propose as like the way To make it disappear? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If this is the proposal you're working on later, when would it disappear? How would you have it just go? Yeah, I mean, you know, I just, I don't understand how you could do it. Like, it's like I said, with the tracking data, you know, if you're transmitting back to Earth, everybody's listening, right?

You know, they may not get, you know, it could be encrypted. You're not seeing the, you know, the actual telemetry. Yeah, it's not stealth. You know, you know, you can't, you know, you can't, you know, you can't, you know, you know, these tracking people, they don't look at the telemetry. They're just looking at the Doppler effect on the radio. And so that, you know, that's all they need. I don't know how you'd fake that aside from like sending up a smaller satellite. It's like the old joke about, you know, the moon landings were faked, but they got Kubrick to fake it. And he was so rigorous that he actually

had them land on the moon to get the, to get the good foot. footage. So, you know, I don't know. I just don't know if you were going to fake a lander why you would, why you would miss a maneuver that bad and say that's how our, that's how our fake lander went out. Like, well, I mean, okay, so here, here. You do it. Jake. What's your theory? Okay. Do it.

Luna 25 is related to the whole Russia, ESA fallout because there was a bunch of ESA stuff on that mission. And Russia very proudly declared after that split that they were going to fly anyway, they were going to be on time, they were going to be, like, so what's worse? Something breaks and you can go blame some engineer downstream or you just straight up couldn't even launch it, like, from a pride perspective, right? But wouldn't you say you were on final descent and then it crashed, though? Like, wouldn't you have, why did they get 98% of the way through a mission and then say,

actually, we didn't fail on our descent to the surface. We just screwed up the ad over before. Yeah, we like just totally screwed up an orbital maneuver. maneuver and then crash into the moon. That's the weirdest one. And maybe that's exactly why it's the perfect one to pick. Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

All right. You know what they did? Here's what happened. They put KSP in front of Vladimir Putin, let him try a lunar landing mission. And however he fucked it up, that's exactly what they did with this Loona 25 storyline. And he just was really bad at his maneuver nodes. And they went, that's it. That's the storyline we're going with.

Luna 25 screwed up its orbital trajectory. and crash into the lunar surface. Yikes. All right, Jake, I'm tacking this one on to our predictions doc for this year. Will there be LRO imagery for Luna 25 or not? Like, will we find the hole? That's interesting. Will Phil Metzger be able to do additional research based on the hole on the moon that Luna 25 left?

Or is there none? What's the international symbol for crashing on the moon? It can't be this. It's kind of... Yeah, it's got to be like, and then back up, you know? Like, it's, you know, it's not just... Yeah. Oh, dear.

Will the 25 be found, Jake? Where are you at? You know, I was nice to rush it on my other predictions, so I'm going to say no. And they did totally fake it. I'm going to go on that. Oh. I feel like Mark's onto something, and they sent a mass simulator instead of, a lander. And so there will be a hole on the moon, but it's not the right size. Yeah.

I don't know. We're going to tell that. It's not like it would have left like a Wiley coyote hole on the moon. It wouldn't look like that, but yeah, I don't know. I'm going to go, we'll find something. All right. Mark, where are you at? Are you in the no current with Jake? you know I was totally unaware of this conspiracy theory before now and so I haven't you know I haven't had a chance to really digest this I mean I it seems convincing but I'm still going to say we're going to find something because it just seems so crazy to me I mean it's not that it's impossible because you know I'm getting more convinced the more time I sit here I'm like man I think they want to fake then it's some wonderful it's such a if they did Like, because it's just, oh, I love the storyline,

I really hope this is true. I hope this is true. I got to change the shirt, though. I got to change the name of this to Ler25. 25 isn't real. This is the birds aren't real theory of space nerds from now on. That's just great. I got to say, though, that means they probably pre-wrote that great press release.

You know, the great announcement where they're like, you know, the, you know, the, did not match calculated parameters and ceased to exist. You know, that was planned well in advance. They really wanted, they were excited to say about how it ceased to exist. I like it. I like it. That's art at that point. It was a great press release.

I laughed at that. Listen, whatever the case is, Jake, real lander or not, Is there a is there someone more in the running for the off nominee of 2023 at the moment? I think this might be it. It might be. It's up there. It's early. We always,

we always declare one in August and something chaotic happens in like October to December. Something chaotic happens on December 28th. Two days after we do the show. Two days after we do the show, Russia ticks the ISS for a cartwheel. Uh, yeah. Okay. I think we've solved Luna 25. So, Mark, I wanted to ask you, like, all these, you're in this now.

We've got clips coming up. And clips is like, you know, we've had all these different kind of countries going after this. We've had Israel and India and China and Russia and all this stuff. I think I'm missing one. Japan. Japan. And so now we've got United States come back on their new plan clips stuff.

How's that going? Tell us what ends up with clips. How are you feeling about it? Step one, I need to say I am speaking on behalf of myself, not my employer, not the U.S. government, nothing else. I'm just talking about what Mark Panning thinks. I mean, let's be honest. It's scary. You know, the landing is scary.

Why is it so scary, though? I feel like we've had this figured out, didn't we? Like, I don't know. It's like self-driving cars. I mean, you know, they're talking about shutting those off in San Francisco now because they keep like blocking emergency vehicles and things like that. You know, all of the individual ingredients are easy. You know, like you can program everything there.

It's just you have to have all the software that accurately detects everything and feeds it all in and does it all at the right time. And it's hard. You know, it's And there's just, you know, one little mistake And, and, you know, ground is unforgiving. Yeah, yeah. So orbits, you know, like, orbiters, they go up there

And you make a bad burn, you know, it went a little bit long Or whatever, and you just corrects the orbit, you know. Sometimes, you know. Sometimes you don't. I mean, sometimes. Sometimes you cease to exist, yeah. Depending. Yeah, sometimes you cease to exist.

But it exists. But most of the time, you know, if it's a small error, you know, you're in slightly the wrong orbit, you fix it. Yeah, you come around again and you get to the next time. Yeah. It's just, you know, the ground doesn't let you fix it. So, you know, there's no room for error. So it makes it frightening. I mean, I'll say it's really, the clips program is really interesting from the point of view of this.

scientists building, working to build the payloads. Because normally, you know, for insight, we, you know, the scientists, you know, we were working with JPL and Lockheed Martin and all of this to build the whole thing together and go through everything together. The payload and this lander, we're all just, you know, integrally connected the whole way. You know, it's like it's, it's, you know, and so. all the feed back and forth is all very clear because, you know, we're building it together. And then for the clips program, you know, we, by the time the lander was selected,

we'd already been through what they call the critical design review and everything. So our payload was set. You know, we couldn't really change anything at the time the lander was selected. So anything that was happening, it's like it's on the lander to fix that. And it's, it's, that makes it stressful. It's workable. I mean, the, the team at Draper has been great. And they, you know, we, we meet with them all the time and it goes great.

But, you know, the, the stress of landing, I mean, by the time Insight landed on Mars, it, you know, JPL and Lockheed Martin related missions, like it felt like it was automatic at that point, right? You know, like they knew how to Mars. They were, you know, you know, they could try all sorts of crazy different landing things and it would work. And, you know, it just felt it felt like a little scary, but I wasn't really all that concerned. You know. Confirming Jake's conspiracy. Yeah, I'm feeling very proud of my whole, my whole take on this now. The JPL guy wasn't even worried about it.

So there you go. I mean, you know, I mean, there's always, I was actually more worried at launch. And I, I, and maybe that's just because I was, I went to Vandenberg to watch that launch. And, and that was the most depressing experience ever, because it's, it was just, it was just marine layer all the way. You know, like, there's fog and you can see about this far in front of you. And it's like, anyway, I was, I was nervous then. You heard more of insight than Scott Tilly heard of Luna 25, so that's good. Yeah.

At least you knew that something was happening. Yeah, there was nothing to see, but you could hear like a, you know, that was there. Maybe Lusha just had a bunch of sound speakers up on the hillside that number. That's why they put the Marine layer there. They fire up harp. They put the Marine layer in, and then they fire up the speakers, and good to go. Yeah. It's so interesting that the, like, the Mars stuff seems to have kind of,

worked itself out, at least for JPL and Lockheed, right? But, you know, there's like the extra complication of an atmosphere there. And you would think that the moon should be... Moon should be easier. You can calculate all of your exact, like, you know, parameters. Like, you know precisely that you can burn once and then 30 minutes later, like to a meter know where you're going to land, right? Like, it's pretty crazy.

So, I don't know. Yeah. I feel like that would be easier. Maybe it isn't. It's all ballistic, right? So if you got your engines modeled perfectly, you should be able to model it all exactly correctly. There's none of this uncertainty of atmospheric patterns.

But obviously it's not easy, you know? Do you know where you're going to land yet, or is that not figured out yet? Yeah, no, it's right here. I don't know if you can see this. Does that clear it up, Dick? That's, this is shrill. The far side is that is half the thing.

So what is that? It's so, I can't follow my finger here. Damn it. That little star right there is in Schrodinger Basin. Okay. That star is at 71 degrees south latitude. And I don't remember the longitude, but I can look it up for you there. It's close enough to write South Pole in an article.

Yeah, so this is the, you know, this is the, uh, um, uh, uh, the shorter basin, it's on the edge of the South Pole-Aitken giant crater, and it's got this nice little peak ring structure, and we're just outside the peak ring structure on the north edge of the of the basin. I always tell people it's a beautiful crater and people look at me like, is that me? No, it's really good looking. I was really curious to see, and I want more pictures from Chandra on three, but like the, you know, starting to get that far south, like, what are the shadows start to do with your nav software? Because, like, they're real crisp shadows and they're long, and you start to get like this weird, kind of like stripy, you know, situation on the ground.

And I'm really curious to see whether that makes it, you know, real hard. Yes. But I mean, I know they're incorporating that in design, obviously, but it should be interesting to see. Well, Mark's thing doesn't need a camera. So. No, no. But the lander will have cameras. Yeah, that's true. The lander has cameras. There will be cameras.

There'll be pictures of where we end up. That's absolutely true. I think this is the only picture so far, Jake, of the... Yeah, I think so. On the surface. So, that's kind of odd. It doesn't look too bad because that's kind of flat, right? Yeah.

But it looks like a weird picture. Like, what's going on here? I mean, it looks like the moon. I mean, it's always... I... I I it's you know it's whenever you see like you know

after China's last landing they had the descent thing and it just kept zooming in and it was just it messed with your mind because it just kept zooming in and it was the same thing over like it just it's like that

there's like that old there's that old I'm going to say GIF because I think it should be a hard G. It's that old GIF that goes around that, you know, it's like you're zooming in on a coastline and it just keeps picking that coastline over and over again. You know, it's just fractal crater upon craterism. So, you know, you can take a distant image of the moon and just crop it and say, you know, I'm on the surface now.

Take note, Luna 25 team. That's for Luna 26. Yeah, yeah. This is all the Chandraiana imagery that we got down to the surface. So, but you're right. Like, yeah, lunar scale is so hard, generally. I've seen a couple images where they'll actually mark or, like, overlay, you know, an Earth map so your brain has something to work with in terms of distance.

And that kind of stuff's been helpful of, like, what city can you fit in this crater is occasionally helpful from my brain? But, yeah, I mean, this just looks like a bunch of movement going by. Yeah. You just keep zooming in and it's just craters and craters and you're zooming in. The whole look the same size. There's a giant craters. Yeah.

You're like, wow, that's a really nice view from 300 kilometers altitude. Oh, no, we're land. Yeah. Huh. That's nuts. Are you guys like, I guess I know you're not on the lander team, but just curious of what you're kind of thing. Like, are you incorporating like lessons from all these kind of recent missions into what you do or what

the landers do? So I guarantee you they will be. I'm not speaking for them or anything. So the interesting thing about our particular lander provider is compared to some of the recent activity on the moon. So our official lander provider is Draper Labs. But it's a sprawling partnership. And the actual lander design is a company called, iSpace USA.

And that name may sound familiar to you because the recent Japanese lander that did not, well, it landed like 100 meters above the surface and then proceeded to continue down and crash. That lander was Ice Base, Japan, same company, just incorporated in Japan versus incorporated in the U.S. Right, right, right. And the as I'm not 100% sure on this, but I believe Draper worked on the the, you know, G&C software for that lander.

And it's just kind of the same team but shuffled around for the Clips Lander to, you know, keep the Clips program happy that it's a U.S. provider, I suspect. Yeah. But that's, which is huge. I mean, no, but honestly, like, yeah, all the legal stuff aside, there's obviously historically been some weird stuff in clips like yeah now I'm gonna forget the name this company orbit beyond no that's not right what was it is that the company uh the company that existed and then didn't exist anymore like some shady stuff that sounds right that that might be a fake

name but there was one like that uh but i mean this situation like they got a rep in already yeah before your thing's flying exactly and they're actually and they're they're actually There's, you know, Ice Base is doing, so they, they are, and the Ice Space press releases, they say they have three missions, M1, M2, M3, and they're calling the Draperlander M3. Yeah, so there's another one in there somewhere. M1 was the one that failed earlier, and M2, I think, is supposed to happen next year. So, in 24 or sometime. I'm not sure on the exact date, but, you know, so they're, you know, I'm, I, I'd like to optimistically think that means they'll have worked out all the bugs and, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, in the, in the, in the, in, in, I'm there with you.

Because that's honestly, my biggest worry of, of the clips program generally is that the structure of it means that companies don't necessarily know that they have a couple of landers in the, in the, in the, in the, in line. So, like, even, even, even astrobatic. right? They're going to fly peregrine sometime, and then they're flying no more peregrins. That's the one peregrine, and then they're doing all their other landers, which like, yeah, there's some stuff that they'll carry over between these platforms, but there's a ton of different things and knowing how many things can go wrong when you try to land on the moon, there's, like, until you're landing the same lander a bunch of times, I don't know if you're going to feel fully confident. And even then, I don't know that you're going to feel fully confident, but being able to get a couple reps in is important, and there's not many of these companies

that actually know that they will have a couple of reps on these lunar lander missions. Yeah, it's, it's, I, I like the idea of clips. I mean, I like the idea of encouraging, you know, the risk-taking. So there's, you know, they, well, this is somewhat inside baseball, but the risk posture and the development for the payloads is very different than what it is if you're doing a, you know, a flagship NASA mission or something like that. They, they, you know, I could throw out all these, you know, 70120.8, all of these like NASA guidelines and stuff that, that are involved here. But it basically means that, you know, when we're building Far Sitesitesites, we can do things like use commercial parts instead of the expensive giant space qualified parts.

And, you know, automotive standards are actually really rigorous, and they make tons of them. So they're actually pretty reliable parts. But they wouldn't be technically space qualified, and it would be hard to fly them under a normal NASA mission. But they let us do it for this Clips mission because it's all viewed as a higher risk posture. They're willing to let more risk slip into the process. That's cool that they do that on the payload side. I don't think I really thought about that. I knew that was kind of happening on the lander side,

but the payload side too, that's really interesting to hear. Yeah, so that's, you know, it opens up. And it also means that, you know, we're building the payload for Farside Seismic Suite for, you know, a tiny fraction of the cost of insight, right? You know, I mean, admittedly we're not supplying the lander here. just doing the payload. But, you know, since our payload is, it has its own com system, it has its own power system, has its own commanded data handling system. I mean, it's basically,

you know, a small sat without propulsion. So, you know, we've got all the ingredients. It used to just be called a small sat for the record. That's the propulsion part is pretty new. So you're, right down center line on that. Yeah. Yeah. Does that... I love it. If your game, I'd love to pull back the curtain a little bit on, like, how you got to where you're at with this particular mission. And we hear a lot about the Clips Lander side of things, but not a ton about getting selected as someone that's going to fly a payload on this mission.

And there's, you know, the NASA payloads, but there's also another bunch of commercial payloads. Set those aside from now. From your end of things, like, what was that process like to actually get this payload to a spot where it got slated on a lander and did you just get a letter one day that said like here's your ticket you're flying on this lander or were you more involved with the process than that it was it was a you know it was a proposal process it's just you know and many ways it's like it's it's a miniature rapid fire version of how you propose missions like insight right so like those are big missions discovery you know there's these discovery missions new frontiers missions there's

There's this whole system in NASA for proposing big missions. They had a program called Prism, which is an acronym that stands for something that I don't remember. I'm not even going to attempt it, but it was called Prism. And, you know, those of us who were wanting to try to fly instruments to the moon, we applied to it. And put in the proposal, and they did the selection, just like how they do it. for missions. You know, so when they do the, one of the cool things about this is when they do a, you know, the announcements, so missions are funded and everything, you know, they have the big announcement,

but ahead of time they call all the PIs, the principal investigators for all of the proposals, and they tell them, you know, either you're selected or you're not. And so that's, you know, the day before or a few hours before or something like that. So, you know, I got to, you know, wake up that day and it would be like, you know, no, they're going to call soon. And I was all set up for disappointment. You know, I was, I was 100% sure we weren't going to be selected. Because to be honest, our proposal was kind of crazy, because at that point, at that point, everything was, you know, the lander was only going to survive the lunar day. And the way the proposal was written, the call was written is they assumed people

would use lander power, do everything, you know, rely on the lander, and of course, die at the end of the lunar day. And so that, you know, that was, and, you know, and we're sitting here going, we don't have to do that. We can make a system that, you know, we just sit on top of the lander and we have our own power. We have our own radio and we will just communicate. We'll just keep going. And I thought there was no chance they'd think, you know, that was selectable. I thought they'd think that was crazy. But apparently they, apparently they liked it.

So we got selected. And I got the phone call. Called and said, you know, you're got to fly to the moon. And I just, you know, ran around my house. Screamed a few times. Who makes those calls? Is it a big head or is it like a secretary or something? It's, so it was one of the NASA associate administrators called.

So, so pretty high up the food chain. Pretty. Yeah, yeah. So, how you can take a guess? So it was, it was, it was unexpected, but pretty, pretty darn excited. Yeah, yeah. Are there, are there, I must have felt like Swiss cheese right before that call came in. It's, nothing, Jake.

You got one. of those, anything? No, I'm staying neutral. I'm staying neutral. Okay. Are there a lot of, are there a lot of payloads like, isn't there like an onboarding process? Like don't you have to like get into like a group and then like you get assigned a slot

after? Is it like that for the payloads? And is there a lot on that list? So there was, so there's been different ways the clips landers have been handled. So the, the. Before Prism came along, I think we're going to be something like the sixth or seventh lander. I've lost count exactly, and then there's issues of bankruptcies and blah, blah, blah. So I don't know exactly where the number is these days.

Could be the first. Yeah, who knows? Who knows? It's still in the running. I wouldn't count it out. Yeah. But, you know, for the first set, there was a call that was basically, they put out a proposal call and it just went to the NASA centers and they said, basically, hey, do you have anything on the shelf that you could fly on one of these things?

I mean, that was more or less what it was. It was something that could, you know, the budget was like pennies. And, you know, and the idea was just you've got something you could stick on a lander because we'd like to fly some science while we're, you know, the main point at that point of clips was we want to encourage commercial lunar landers, but we'd like to be able to do some science too. So they said, okay, what do you have on the shelf, basically? And then there was another round that was similar just said, but it was open to, you know, researchers outside of NASA centers. And from that, they just made a list and they were assigning them to landers. So that was

the first part. And then Prism, they actually, there's now been three calls on that. And those have been, you know, so those were, we were told, proposed something for ours, it was proposed something for Schrodinger Basin. So we knew they were planning a lander to go to that. And we had to make a case for why it would be interesting to send our particular payload there. Right. I'll be honest is why our thing is called Farside Seismic Suite. I'm not very original in naming.

And, you know, I didn't want to come up with a clever name, and I was like, the call had all of this information about how it can't be site agnostic, was the words they used. So they didn't want instruments that could just fly anywhere. They wanted instruments that really wanted to go to

Shriver Basin. This is amazing. Yeah. They wanted, and And, you know, you're just a white label in these things at this point. Yeah.

I don't tell them, but this one in particular is meant for. You know, it's, I mean, yeah, so what I saw,

when I saw that, I was like, you know, it's a seismometer. Of course, it's side agnostic. I'd like to put a seismometer anywhere.

But I was like, but we've had seismometers on the near side before and there's this open question about whether we've ever. Does it even exist back there?

Who knows what's back there? You know? The interesting thing is we've recorded moonquakes all over the near side and only a very tiny bit on the far side. And there's questions on how much of that is due to where the seismometers were. Of course, they were all on the near side, and so it was easier to see things on the near side. But their events should have been able to propagate from the far side.

So it's either that there's something deep in the mantle that's blocking, you know, that's attituating out the seismic waves, or there's actually fewer events on the far side. And there are differences between the near side and the far side. They look different. There's a lot more heat-producing elements near the surface on the near side. So there could be differences in structure all the way down. And so made a case that it's worth having a seismometer on the far side because this is a really big question that we don't know the answer to.

So I was like, I'm going to put that in the name. That we have to go to the far side. I love it. I love it. And they also required it to be an instrument sweet, which means more than one instrument. So we flew a broadband seismometer and a short period seismometer. So I put sweet in the name because, you know, it's a sweet. Otherwise, they might say, well, they're just two seismometers.

But no, it's a sweet. So the name is entirely just like, I was worried they wouldn't think we would qualify. so I just put it in the name that we qualify. It's a full circle to the first segment of this show. Yes. Yeah. Good proposal stuff for sure. So good.

It's so interesting like the whole, I mean, aside from whether the landers work or not, one thing I find really interesting about this program is that like, this is a whole very different way to pick science because, like you said, before you would kind of have like a handful of instruments that were tight, coupled to the mission. We're talking long project times, long lead times, you know, getting like a PI position on one of these things is like generally like a career thing. Like it's like that's, this was the mission or the instrument that I got to be a PI of and like, you know, they went to

another planet. And that's like your thing. But like with all these flying and having six, 10, 15 payloads, I don't know how many are on there, but like quite a few payloads and that many, like there's, there's going to be a lot of instruments going there. And I feel like, I feel like, this would give a kind of, A, an opportunity for scientists to pitch three or four and maybe even get more than one. And then also just sort of the way that NASA can kind of be like, we got another ride. So let's grab like the next six or seven that look good. That one, that one. Okay, let's go.

And it's like, it's very different. And I'm kind of curious to know how you feel about that as a career scientist and like whether that's like a welcome change or if you're nervous about what the implications. are or whatever, right? Yeah, it's a mixture of, I mean, everything you said is correct. It's, it really does, in some sense, democratize the process of getting an instrument on a mission because, you know, anybody can apply to this, the resources to get in. I mean, it's still an expensive process. You know, it's, you know, I'm not, I don't want to minimize that, but it's, you know, compared to finding hundreds of millions of dollars for full national NASA missions. This is the low barrier to entry sort of system.

So it's really exciting in that sense. But it's still a lot of, you know, it's still a huge amount of work. It's just happening a lot faster. And just that the higher risk level is both exciting and terrifying and terrifying, right? So, you know, when all of this is said done and the launch and landing happens presumably in 2025, I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not guessing on launch schedules because that's a, that's a fool's game. Listen, that's what you got to the website. You're covered because on the website, it says launch date

2025 and status of future. So. Yes, there you go. So you're good. You're covered by this website. status future. But, you know, so 2020, 2020 rolls around. And, you know, this, we were selected in 21, I think. Yeah, we were selected in 21 of, it's been four years of my life. And, you know, four years of lots of people's life because, you know, I'm,

lots of engineers are working on this. And all of this work goes in. and if it crashes, you know, that's going to, I mean, and there's always the risk to that, but that risk is undoubtedly higher in the clips program than, you know, I mean, it's by definition. They're accepting higher risks, right? So I'm not going to, I'm not going to say what percentage chance of landing is at this point. But it's certainly a lower percentage chance of landing than would be acceptable and, you know, an entire bespoke NASA mission, right? So it's still frightening on that sense, you know, this is.

Yeah. I want to just like, I want to like teleport into the future. I want to go to like 2032, 233 maybe. And like at that point, you're working on like your third clips payload. And the people today that are working on Dragonfly are like just getting started, you know. I'm just really curious to talk to. I am on the Dragonfly mission too, by the way. There you go.

There you go. So he's filling his time until then. We're booking you for a show in 2032. Yeah, yeah. If we could go back to 2023, Mark, and be like, which track did you like better? I just really interesting to see, like, you know, how that'll, how those two streams will sort of feed into each other and what will change kind of long-term permit. I think it's really interesting. That's what I'm most excited about clips.

So not so much what science is actually going to do or what they're going to act land, but just like the way it changes everything. I mean, it's a, I mean, so on Insight, I got involved in the Insight mission in 2008. And, you know, we got to Mars in 2018. That's, you know, 10 years between when I got involved. And that's, you know, the PI of that mission, Bruce Banner, which there's a T on the end. So he's not the Incredible Hulk. He's got a T on the end.

Anyway, when he, you know, he got started working with that, you know, what ended up becoming that back in the, you know, early 90s. So the timeline between concept and actually being on that other planet was so long. And, you know, obviously that, you know, dragonfly is a good example because it's going to be. between when we got selected and when we launch, it's going to be of that same order of magnitude, you know, 10 years, but then it's going to take seven-ish years to even get to where we're going. You know, so I, when we proposed Dragonfly, I had to make a budget. And it's like I made a budget that basically went to my retirement.

I'm going to say, you could have a kid. day he could he could drive you to the like landing right exactly exactly he could work on it yeah it's like all right great it's it's it's a crazy difference in time scale i mean for for for far side side suite you know we were selected in and 21 within less than a year from selection we've been through critical design review which was this big thing where you know you're you're saying everything's set in stone this is what we're building. And it's, you know, from here on out, we're just bending metal and putting it out there.

And so that normally takes years and years before you get to that point. It's like it was like nine months after we were selected. You know, so. A little bit of whirlwind. It makes me think the Pluto Orbiter mission is going to be named after the first PI on the project, like 50 years after they died and it's the same contiguous project. You know what I mean? There will be seven PIs on that thing just because of how it's structured.

Auduously award mission names to the people who started. Keep renaming it. I mean, it's true. I mean, you know, to have a trajectory that can actually slow down and get an orbit around Pluto, you can't do what they did for New Horizons. I looked at that one. Zoom and by, right? The home entranced for, like, you know, like the normal, like what you would do for Mars,

like that sort of like optimal, low energy transfer. For Pluto is like 70 years or something. Like, it's not tenable. Like, you have to, you have to go faster and then slow down a lot more when you get there. Otherwise, it's not going to work. Although this is an argument for the micro machines-based data transmission, because 70 years from now, we'll be able to understand the micromachines guy, but I don't know that all the tech will still work.

So I'm just saying, I'm going to submit this to Prism next time. And we'll see if this micro-machines guy transmission protocol, the MMG. TP, that'll be the system that everyone uses for the Pluto missions. I'll say on that note of thinking about data transmission, I was actually involved in a project where we were arguing that instead of trying to get better and better radio or laser or whatever optical transmission or whatever,

just fly a whole, this was specifically for Mars, but also thinking about for other bodies, fly a whole bunch of satellites that go in an orbit that is basically like the homen transfer. So you hang out near Earth on one end and near Mars on the other end, and you just get really, really high data rates while you're close by, and you have a great big, huge hard drive on this thing. And then when you get back to Earth, when you get back to close to Earth,

you just burst all of that out as quick as possible. It's like the old story. Buzz Alden is just like, yeah, I didn't talk. Like, you know, cyclers are back. Yeah. Data cyclers. He's going nuts right now. Buzz. Shout out buzz. It makes sense. It's like, you know, if you want to send terabytes of data on Earth, it's a whole lot more efficient to put it on

a hard drive and mail it. Yeah, yeah. This is the what's the bandwidth of a 747? Yeah. Whoever wrote that years ago, like that's still an accurate thing, even more so. It's, you know, it's the bandwidth is high, the latency is high, but it still works out for you, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we used to make that joke Canada a lot because the internet data caps were used to be really bad in the early days in broad then like especially compared to the United States like you guys were just crushing us in like terms of getting shit done and so the people were complaining about whatever and they're

like yeah watch this i'll i'll ship like a whole hard drive full of stuff from halifaxon vancouver and it'll get there faster and it'll cost less you know like unbelievable how much this cost well well yeah that's we're Red, time. Holy smokes. Red, we talked about it. That's the moon. Figured it out.

Yeah. Mark, we look forward to your totally faked seismometer mission that you're totally flying. Let us know. Status future. Status future. Same with Luna 25.

That's future. There's going to be. There's going to be great data. You know, it's you're going to love my idea. Everybody's going to, everybody's going to,

I'm going to love it. It's going to be amazing to it. It's such specific data, too. I'm really excited for the niche of that far side suite. Just nothing like it. It's so targeted to that spot that I'm very thrilled about. And I hope you come up with a completely different concept for the next mission going to the North Pole. The North Pole Seismic Suite. I cannot wait for that one as well. It should be great. Thanks for hanging out with us. Where should people follow along if they're not following along with your mission yet. You personally or your mission, anywhere you want to send them in particular? Yeah, so I'm, I still technically have a Twitter X account, but I almost never look at it anymore. So I'm on Blue Sky, for those of you are on Blue Sky. So it's just Mark Panning,

B. Sky.Sky, not social. And there's, you can see, there's updates on the JPL webpage. I actually have a website called seismology.space. Maybe if you have, If you ever get really bored, you can look at that. It's a little out of data, but it is a great URL. That's awesome. Okay. We're on blue sky as well now, Anthony. You can see us atoffnom.com.

So we got the handle hooked up to it. So identity verified blue check for free on blue sky. And it actually means something. So that's pretty good. So check us out there because I can't get Twitter to load still. I don't know what happens in mind. I can't get boost got a load at the moment. So all the Twitters don't work anymore.

There's 800 Twitters. They're all failing at the same time. It's great. What a great world we live in. Yeah. Well, Mark, thanks so much, man. This was awesome. I'm really glad we didn't get you on Wii Martians, but we got you here and this was a lot of fun.

It's definitely fun. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, yeah, for sure. See y'all next week. What are we doing next week? Do we have a thing picked out next week? No, not yet. We don't.

That's another topic. We're going to let the show come to us. You'll find out. It'll be great. Don't worry. We got it. We totally got it. Everything's fine here.

We'll see you next week. Or you'll cease to exist. We'll cease to exist. No better way to end it. See ya.